Lovher: Beyond the Boundaries of OnlyFans. This is a project that aims to investigate the boundaries of the OnlyFans social network, known for disseminating erotic and paid content. Tamara Marino and Simon Troger interact with the idea of legal and ethical boundaries through an intervention in which delicacy and brutality coexist. The background male voice recites under his breath, as if it were a children's nursery rhyme, lines from a love poem by J. Prevert. This operation, the resulting images of which were created through A.I., is intended to amplify a sense of disgust. The aesthetic restitution involves the creation of a post that can only be used by payment, violating all the conditions of conventional social networks. This content addresses issues such as sexuality, violence, and child pornography, offering a multi-layered reading. By leveraging new AI technologies to find real images on the topic of child pornography, this operation opens a gateway to a wide range of controversial questions and hypotheses. The video, in fact, violated standards according to Onlyfans policy. The images in question, resulted in the cancellation of the publication of the specific post, and the subsequent blocking of the account.

Sexual abuse is a complex and constantly evolving phenomenon, the monitoring of which, often piecemeal, does not give a clear picture of the situation. The Council of Europe estimates that 1 in 5 children in Europe are sexually abused (Council of Europe, 2018). In the United Kingdom, 7.5 percent of adults are estimated to have been sexually abused before the age of 16-about 3.5 percent of men and 11.5 percent of women (Home Office, UK, 2021). In the United States, Finkelhor and colleagues (2014) estimated the prevalence of sexual abuse experienced before age 17 to be 11.2 percent for females and 1.9 percent for males. Also in the U.S., in 2011, Stoltenborgh and colleagues conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis including 331 independent samples with a total of 9,911,748 participants and found a prevalence of childhood sexual abuse of 18 percent in females and 7.6 percent in males. According to the latest data reported by the U.S. Administration for Children & Families (Child Maltreatment Report, 2019), as many as 60,927 children were sexually abused in 2019. There are several contexts in which abuse can be perpetrated: the home, online, school, recreational and educational settings.

Text by Benedetta Monti