You getting ready for TNT. You wondering which shows to see this year. You trying to sort out your schedule.

Whatever you choose to do, you’re the protagonist. That’s one of the lessons of POV (Point of View), a recurring meme that’s accustomed us to performing different perspectives, putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. POV brings everyday experiences and repressed emotions (rage, frustration, sadness, anxiety…) into view, staging microdramas that, as Sara Ahmed puts it, go beyond the personal to reveal broader sociocultural structures.

Núria Guiu brings this online phenomenon to the stage, furthering her long-standing exploration of the bonds between body, image, digitality and power. In POV, her background in anthropology becomes more relevant than ever. That’s not just because subjectivity and perspective are core anthropological concerns, but also because the showing of this piece coincides with the submission of her undergraduate thesis (congrats, Núria!). This may be a mere anecdote, and it is, but it also says something about how we always get trapped inside the fiction we construct, and how the most mundane things inevitably blend with the most elaborate.

Most of the images we see on social media are of bodies. Bodies that gesticulate, bodies in motion, bodies that see. The body is always the relationship between what I say and what you read. It is always possessed by multiple subjectivities. When asked whether POV could be classed as a performative lecture, Núria shrugs and says what she does is dance. That and laugh at herself. Because her view of anthropology is not outward, but inward: toward the bodily effects of images that may be apparently intangible, but which determine what we see culturally.

With a post-ironic, self-reflexive spirit, POV aligns with other pieces in this year’s programme that also explore the effects of images on our subjectivity, such as Fogonazo by Serrucho, Mamarratxa Attack by Julia Irango, and Fasting Girls by Marta Azparren.