Olga Superflua is an Italian artistic collective formed by Andrea Carlotta Pelaia, Marco Caudera and Andrea Carozzi. Their practice moves between performance, dance, film and visual art, with a particular interest in the body, the image and the ways in which individuals present and shape themselves within contemporary culture. In their work, the collective focuses on the body as a material that can be shaped and transformed, and on social ideas surrounding beauty, self-improvement and perfection. Their approach combines performativity, visual excess, grotesque and humour, shifting serious subjects into unusual, playful and often absurd situations.
Para Lucir Hay Que Sufrir begins with a question: how much suffering are we willing to accept in order to become the best version of ourselves? Here, the body becomes a material to be shaped, smoothed, sculpted and compressed into an image that supposedly represents our “true self” most faithfully. In the process of beautification, however, the boundaries between self-care, self-improvement and violence towards the body become increasingly blurred.
The film considers the body both as a battlefield and as a display space—a surface through which we present ourselves to the world while trying to attain an inner state of perfection. In the so-called “analgesic society”, where every form of discomfort is meant to be eliminated and concealed, Para Lucir Hay Que Sufrir dwells on the paradox of suffering: what if pain has become part of the path towards the image we desire? Colour, grotesque, exaggeration and dance transform the domestic space into an absurd stage where the body is simultaneously something to be shaped, a source of pleasure and a site of pressure.