Deborah de Robertis: From Miroir de l’Origine to RAPE TAPES, AI and the Male Gaze

More than a decade after Miroir de l’Origine turned her body into an instantly recognisable image, Deborah de Robertis speaks about RAPE TAPES, the male gaze, abuse of power in the art world, OnlyFans, artificial intelligence, visibility and why she insists: “I’m not an activist. I’m an artist.”

Short version on Artribune (Italian)

An extended interview on what changes when the artist no longer wants her own body to carry the entire image.

Deborah de Robertis has a problem that visibility does not necessarily solve. An image can make an artist recognisable and, at the same time, become a screen hiding everything behind it.

In 2014, with Miroir de l’Origine, she sat with her legs open in front of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde at the Musée d’Orsay. The photograph travelled much further than the performance itself. It became scandal, provocation, feminist image and shorthand for de Robertis. What was harder to transmit was the question already embedded in the work: who is looking, who is being looked at, and who controls the image?

More than ten years later, RAPE TAPES changes the direction of that question. RAPE TAPE I is explicitly presented by the artist as not made with AI, while the following two works use artificial intelligence to reconstruct memories involving men from her past. On the artist’s website, RAPE TAPE II is linked to Juan d’Oultremont and RAPE TAPE III to François Odermatt. The point is not simply technological. The artist who became famous by exposing herself is now trying to find forms that can bring other people, memories and power structures into the image.

What emerged during our conversation was therefore less a story about nudity than a story about the politics of looking. De Robertis spoke in English, which is not her first language. Her answers have been lightly edited for grammar, repetition and clarity while preserving her meaning and, wherever possible, her original phrasing.

The allegations and experiences of abuse discussed below are de Robertis’s own account and are presented as such.

Interview with Deborah de Robertis

With RAPE TAPES, there seems to be a shift. For years you exposed your own body. Now you expose other men and, above all, your personal experience.

Formally it is different, but for me it is a logical continuation. The change had already begun about two years ago, when I started talking about myself. Before that, I never really talked about myself. I talked about women in general, about concepts, about Courbet, about art history. I used my body, but I didn’t talk about my own experience.

People think I had always exposed myself because I showed my body. But I only really began to expose myself when I started talking about what I had experienced. Showing men is not new either. In my early videos and performances, I was very interested in turning the gaze around. I studied the position of the model as an object in art history: the model as the object of the gaze, the prostitute, the muse. I put myself in those positions, but I was filming them. That was always important.

So the camera was already a way of preventing yourself from becoming completely trapped inside the position of the object?

Yes. When I took the risk of being objectified in those performances, the fact that I was not only being watched but was also filming was essential. I could play submission, but I still had my own subjectivity.

This is why I don’t really use “female gaze” so much. I would rather talk about female subjectivity, our own subjectivity as artists, as people, as women. Historically, women were the ones posing. They were not the ones allowed to look and express their gaze in the same way. With L’Origine du monde, people said that I gave Courbet’s woman a face. But principally, I gave her a gaze.

And yet you realised very early that without a female body in the image, people were less interested in looking.

Yes, for very sexist reasons. In my early work I filmed men because I was fascinated by reversing the power roles, including in contexts connected to pornography, prostitution or male seduction. But people were bored.

I remember a professor saying to me, “What do we care to see an old man in a film?” I had all these films with men, but people really started to get interested and to think when they saw a female body in the frame. So at some point I understood that I had to put my body at the centre of the work for a while.

Your work challenges the male gaze. But could the male gaze itself also be one of the reasons why the work received so much attention? In other words, does desire arrive before the artwork?

It’s a very good question. My work gets attention for good and bad reasons, and also for voyeuristic reasons. I know that.

I could have decided to use completely different codes, but I didn’t want to censor myself just so that men would not look at me. I didn’t want to think about my performance in reaction to the male gaze. I wanted to ignore the male gaze first and do it the way I wanted to do it.

With Miroir de l’Origine, I knew that men could look at me and sexualise my body. But if you really look at the performance, the way I present myself is very clinical. It’s like a dancer. There is no sexual provocation coming from me. For me, challenging the male gaze also means saying: okay, you can watch this, but watch it differently. Watch it for what it is. I will not hide myself.

So the issue is not simply whether someone looks, but whether the gaze can be challenged once the image is already there?

Yes. That’s why I didn’t hide it. For me it is more interesting to challenge the male gaze than to say, “Don’t look at it.” If you tell someone not to look, of course they will look. I wanted to show myself in the way I chose and still force that gaze to confront something different.

You said something during our conversation that radically changes how Miroir de l’Origine can be understood: “In 2014 I opened my vagina. It was like I opened my mouth.” Did you already know exactly what your body was saying?

No. In 2014 I opened my vagina. It was like opening my mouth, so I said something without words. My body said something that my mind could only partially understand at the time.

I was criticising institutions, power roles and the hierarchy in art, but I was also a young woman inside those situations. In my experience, men in the art world, directors, curators, collectors, could use their interest in my work to put me in a sexual position. I could be invited privately and then ignored in public spaces and museums. It was before #MeToo, so there was much less space to understand what today we would describe as an abuse of power. At the time, a young woman could simply be described as an opportunist. The question of power inside those dynamics was much less visible.

In France you referred to the droit de cuissage. In Italy we sometimes use the expression “obolo del sofà”, literally the price of the sofa. But both expressions suggest an exchange: you give me your body, I give you an opportunity. Doesn’t that already describe the situation from the point of view of the man in power?

Yes. That is the important point. The expression assumes that you give me your body and I give you a possibility. A transaction. But no. There is no transaction.

The man in the art world thinks that the woman artist owes him her body and perhaps he will give her a possibility in return. But even if there were a transaction, why should women have to give their bodies to have what they deserve to have without giving their bodies?

A man can have dinner late at night with an art director and it is a business dinner. If a woman does the same thing, suddenly people say she wanted sex. Women artists don’t owe anyone their bodies in order to have a place in art history.

OnlyFans makes another contradiction visible: showing a body is not the same as making it available. Did the platform make that distinction even clearer to you?

Yes. I opened it for art projects and also to have some money to pay for my art, but the main idea was art projects. And there you see the limits of the system. Nobody cares about the art project. They just want vagina.

Men say, “I give you €300, I want to see your vagina.” And I say: no, are you crazy? Buy me a picture for €15,000 and then we can speak about it. For personal reasons, I cannot give away my body like that. People fantasise about seeing this vagina, the media fantasise about it, patriarchy fantasises about it, but in my work there is also an illusion around it.

I like the idea of using OnlyFans when I have an art project for it. But I cannot give away my image and my art for some little money.

There is another contradiction around visibility. You are highly recognisable, yet you describe yourself as very much outside the system. Has visibility failed to become institutional recognition?

Yes. The visibility I have is very short-lived. I do a performance, sometimes I have to go very strong even to get that visibility, people talk about it for a few days, and then it is finished.

What I now consider good visibility is different. I see students starting to study my work. I see other forms of interest. Then the work starts developing beyond the media and does not need to exist only through a few days of attention. That is good.

But media visibility has never really opened opportunities for me in the art world. It is almost the opposite. The more performances I do, the less I feel that I have opportunities inside the art world.

That is a very strong claim. You did mention Massimo Minini as an important exception.

Yes. He was the only one I met when I was younger who did something for my work without trying to put me in that sexual situation. He showed my work at FIAC in France and he offered me my first frames. It was important for me because it was an experience without abuse. He was honest. We didn’t end up working together in the gallery, but that experience mattered.

Which means that scandal can make an image circulate without necessarily making the work enter art history.

Yes. When there is no scandal, people often don’t care. That is something I have experienced many times. But for me, the work cannot be reduced to scandal. I want people to see what is behind it, and I can see that this is beginning to happen when students and other people start to study the work.

Perhaps that is where RAPE TAPES becomes especially important. The later videos use AI to create scenes that did not exist as filmed events. You use a false image to speak about truth. Why AI?

At first I wanted to make a short experimental film and reconstruct the scenes. Then I thought it was interesting to use AI because it is contemporary, but also because AI is already being used in misogynistic ways, for example to virtually undress women.

I thought it was interesting to reappropriate that tool and use it to get as close as possible to my memory and my inner subjectivity. It’s a fake to say real things. I really love that ambiguity. I can use AI to question reality and at the same time give myself another freedom as an artist.

There is also a change in who carries the burden of exposure. Until now, your body was almost always the visible evidence.

Yes, and that has been a frustration for me. It is impossible to film the men you accuse, especially when you cannot even speak to them anymore and there are legal procedures going on. For a long time I was frustrated by the fact that I only had my own body to speak through.

People think I am narcissistic, that I show myself because I like myself. But no. I use my body because I have it, while as an artist I want to go further. I want to confront the institution, confront men, confront these structures.

With AI, slowly, I can move outside my own body. I can create a virtual confrontation and expose them instead of exposing myself. Not as vengeance. Artistically, I simply think it is more interesting.

This also challenges the signature image that has followed you since 2014. Many artists spend their careers repeating the form that made them recognisable. You seem increasingly unwilling to do that.

Today, to show my vagina again would have no sense for me. At that time, in 2014, it had a meaning. There were not so many explicit gestures like that outside pornography, and there was no #MeToo in our minds yet. I was saying something in a way that challenged people. But today it would have to take another form.

I had a period when I showed my vagina a lot. That was my “showing my vagina” period. Then I started painting on things and working on colonial monuments. The body became secondary. Then I stole an artwork, something I had always wanted to do. Now I want to make films. I have wanted to work with cinema for a long time. The form has to adapt to what I am doing.

Which is perhaps why you resist the label “activist”. Your work is clearly political, but you insist that this distinction matters. Why?

I’m not an activist. I’m an artist. It doesn’t mean that I’m not political, but I don’t position myself as an activist. For me, form is fundamental.

The body is a tool, but it cannot be a tool that you always use in exactly the same way to say something different. If every time there is another political message but the form is always the same, then you become only an activist. As artists, we have to be interested in form. That is also why I use AI differently. The body can be central, secondary or disappear. It depends on the work.

You have never exhibited in Italy. Would you like to?

Yes, I would love to exhibit in Italy. I really love it when Italians are interested in my work.

And there is something I have been thinking about for a long time: Cicciolina. I have always been interested in working with her figure in my work. You know the work with Jeff Koons and her. I think it is really interesting, and I have been thinking for a long time about how to work with that figure.

I would really like to meet her. Actually, could we meet her together?

After the Body

RAPE TAPES does not amount to an abandonment of the politics of the body. What changes is who has to carry the exposure. For years, de Robertis’s body carried the confrontation with the museum, the history of the nude, the male gaze and the public appetite for an image that could be consumed much faster than the argument behind it. The body gave the work visibility, but that visibility repeatedly threatened to reduce the work to the body.

Artificial intelligence gives her another possibility. Its importance here is not technological novelty for its own sake. De Robertis uses AI because it allows the image to move away from the evidence of her own flesh and towards memory, reconstruction and confrontation. The deepfake, usually discussed as a crisis of truth, becomes a way of asking whether an artificial image can carry a subjective truth that documentary evidence cannot provide. The ethical problem remains, especially when real people and allegations are involved, but it is precisely that unstable territory that the work chooses to enter.

The sentence that stays with me is not the most scandalous one. It is her insistence that she is an artist rather than an activist. De Robertis is not rejecting politics; she is rejecting the idea that political urgency makes form secondary. If the body became a language in 2014, repeating the same gesture forever would eventually turn that language into a logo. Her move into painting, colonial monuments, theft, film and now AI makes more sense when seen from that position.

Perhaps the continuity in her practice is not nudity at all, but control over the conditions of looking: who looks, who is looked at, who can make the image, and who remains outside it. In 2014 that argument had to pass through her body. RAPE TAPES suggests that she is now looking for ways to move the camera, and some of the burden, elsewhere. Whether the art world will follow the work rather than the scandal remains an open question.

Antonino La Vela