As a concept, SVENTHING is a contradiction of abject ridicule and pure intention. At first glance, it’s just public ding-donging with a garnish of pasta. But look beyond that and you’ll see desire, humour, discomfort, shame—life, basically—all tangled together.
Homoeroticism has seen its share of nudity over the years, but red Sven in spaghetti is different. It’s not just desire as art. A fuck-you to the 2020s so far? Perhaps. To Marais’ lens, it’s as if Sven as “thing” just crawled out of a Berlin gutter and similarly doesn’t need to be objectified to be arousing.
Sometimes, an idea just sticks and the two of them conceptualised this story over a sporadic burst of text messages. The result shows the polished technique of a seasoned photographer colliding with a performer’s deliberately scrappy chaos, forcing the viewer into a standoff: everything here is “wrong.” Too slippery for the algorithm. Too sticky for the mainstream.
Marais, at his core, knows how to make bodies look. But Sven refuses to let the camera’s gaze dominate them. Instead, SVENTHING makes the viewer complicit, and forces us to confront our own precarious relationships to the flesh and to public spectacle.
The ultimate “why” of this series is to dirty the gaze—and to deliver us from evil. It obliterates structure, paints over it, and force-feeds us what we loathe about life.
