Alessandro Merlo's 'Por Mi Tango' Redefines Desire Through Dance

Photographer Alessandro Merlo's series 'Por Mi Tango' strips tango of its conventional imagery, focusing instead on the raw tension between bodies. The work, featured on C41 Magazine, uses an enveloping red palette—upholstered walls, curtains, and skin merging into a single chromatic substance—to create a claustrophobic, inner-chamber atmosphere. Merlo's use of red evokes Pedro Almodóvar's cinematic color symbolism, where red embodies desire, danger, and theatricality. The series deconstructs tango into isolated gestures: a leg crossing over another, a hand resting on a hip, figures mirroring each other. A white-painted face disrupts the sensuality, introducing a mask-like, theatrical element. One image shows a solitary body in a dance posture without a partner, suggesting that the gesture survives the encounter. Desire is portrayed not as linear but as circular, returning to the self. The dancers could be lovers, adversaries, or reflections, and their embrace amplifies rather than resolves ambiguity. ROT's costumes—with cuts, back openings, and vertical pleats—become part of the choreography, revealing and concealing the body. The series captures the minimal, unstable distance between desiring someone and desiring to be desired.