1-800 Desires Series:

1‑800 DESIRES takes shape as an inquiry into the nature of desire: the vital and ambivalent force that drives existence and actively participates in constructing what we are, pursue and project. At its core lies a tension between the desire we recognize as intimate and that which is induced, shaped or encoded by the images, values and structures of contemporary culture.

Rather than presenting desire as an exclusively individual experience, D’Amato situates it within a field of correspondences between the subject and the collective. In some works, the desiring subject is rendered visible through signs that either replace or absorb identity: emblems of power, wealth, intimacy, recognition and possession that condense personal aspirations and social constructs. In others, the inquiry moves beyond the boundaries of representation and expands into installations in which presence and participation introduce new dimensions into the work.

Moving between image, matter and experience, 1‑800 DESIRES examines how desire is recognized, takes form, circulates and transforms. The medium through which it travels does not operate as a neutral support: it may materialize, amplify, commodify or redirect desire—or transform it into a collective force. What appears profoundly personal thus reveals its simultaneous belonging to a broader fabric of shared impulses, projections and imaginaries.

The project does not seek to define desire or resolve its contradictions, but to keep them active: desire as both vital impulse and cultural construct; as intimate experience and collective force; as something that shapes our reality while being shaped, in turn, by the media and contexts through which it travels.

Situated within Carla D’Amato’s broader pursuit of emulating life, 1‑800 DESIRES shifts that inquiry from the traces left by events toward one of the invisible forces that sets them in motion.