In his photo and video documentaries, Tobias Zielony presents scenes of subcultures in modern cities, as consequences of immigration/emigration, prostitution, drugs, and unemployment. He frequently casts teenagers as his protagonists and records their daily lives. Confronting reality through his work, Zielony becomes a part of each scene not only as an observer but as an accomplice.
Le Vele di Scampia is an urban residential project developed between 1962 and 1975 in Scampia near Naples. Today, this region is a center of European drug trafficking dominated by the Camorra mafia. For this project, Zielony took 7,000 photographs of locations and adolescents in this area at night and created a nine-minute animated film.
Big Sexyland consists of a series of photographs and a video. Shot under artificial or infrared light, the photographs feature portraits of young men in a porno cinema and its adjoining park in Berlin, while the three-minute video shows a sleeping young man. By concentrating on the behaviors of these young men, the artist depicts the porno cinema as a phenomenon of Western capitalist society, a place where all desires are projected.
