A woman lies motionless, enclosed in a glass case in the middle of a restaurant. She is not Snow White, but one of the many hunger artists who, between the 19th and 20th centuries, turned voluntary starvation into a public spectacle. A slow, immediacy-defying performance, a test of endurance, the grotesqueness made all the more extreme by the restaurant setting. Sidelong glances at the unfed woman while one’s fork lifts a chunk of steak. Eyes transfixed behind glass. Devouring someone with a gaze.

It is around this image that Marta Azparren, artist-in-residence at this year’s TNT, has built her theatrical piece. She is joined on stage by dancer Eiden Peloche, sound artist Haize Lizarazu, and performing chef Carles Tarrasó, to embark on a journey that explores the connections between hunger and images, between eating and spectating.

The eye and the stomach are two organs that apparently have nothing in common. Yet, as Amélie Nothomb might say, they share the same metaphysics. With a background in experimental cinema, all of Marta’s work is driven by profound reflections on film and the construction of the gaze. From the testimonies of former hunger artists to culinary research, from psychoanalysis to TikTok (the new glass case), Fasting Girls drifts between historical anecdote and present-day urgencies, asking what compels someone to stop eating in a world obsessed with total visibility. As Marta herself wrote in Cine ciego (Blind Cinema), “We must halt the flow of images before they devour us.”

Fasting Girls joins a body of work that feels like research in the field, while also triggering the artistic processes required to move beyond pure concept. We are thinking of POV, by Núria Guiu, or Extraña alegría, by Javier Hernando. But perhaps it is in less verbal pieces, such as No ser ni la sombra de lo que se fue, by María Jerez, or Si fuera una película, by Macarena Recuerda, where the concern with overexposure and the desire to disappear resonate most acutely.