Orgasmagoria

As part of the IDFA Doclab festival Orgasmagoria is a durational film about sexual pleasure in the digital age. Dries Verhoeven created the work in collaboration with a group of international (cyber)sex workers, porn actors and their friends. In front of the camera, they close their eyes and imagine a future in which desire is inextricably tied to technology, money and power. While in offline life we tend to approach sexuality and power with caution, the internet offers a space for extreme fantasies and forms of sexual power. This 21st-century blend of intimacy and loneliness, physicality and sterility, is tied to neocolonial power relations and the economic interests of tech multinationals. But this is a two-way street: the performers know how to manipulate desire, turning the customer’s hunger for control into a source of their own power. Orgasmagoria is screened daily at sex theater Casa Rosso. As in an old-fashioned porn cinema, visitors can enter and leave at any moment, while the film unfolds as an endless series of personal stories, fables and dystopias. In a domain saturated with explicit imagery, Verhoeven brings imagination back into play.