Tradere In Latin, it means to pass on, but also to let go, to betray. It is reminiscent of the word trade, which in English means commerce.
How do places and people change when viewed from the outside? What happens when this gaze is the commodifying gaze of mass tourism? How does a ritual become folklore and an identity become a brand? Starting with the scam of the orecchiette pasta from Bari Vecchia—bought at the supermarket and sold to tourists as if it were handmade—the performance undermines the dichotomy between reality and the narration of reality, questioning the survival of identity in the age of its “tourist reproducibility.” Industrial orecchiette sold as artisanal becomes a symbol of false authenticity, a fetish offered to the “paying” and decontextualizing gaze of the visitor, who also transforms places and people into objects of consumption. The presence of the visitor is never a neutral act.

It is a transformative intervention that distorts urban planning and social structure. Historic centers become transit settings. The territory, emptied of its residential function and transformed into a speculative asset, becomes inaccessible to its own residents. In Tradere, the public is led to question its own condition as an observer. It occupies an uncomfortable position: it is an integral part of this mechanism of erosion, it is the external gaze that, at the very moment it seeks genuine experience, accelerates its distortion.
The phenomenon investigated in Tradere is not a local anomaly, but rather a symptom of a systemic pathology of cognitive and experiential capitalism. In an era in which the market has saturated the production of objects, accumulation is shifting towards the colonization of time, rituals, and community ties. Does the invisible find space in our gaze?