Collective Sex as a Collective Text: Liberté by Albert Serra Through the Optics of Roland Barthes

Abstract This article examines Albert Serra’s Liberté (Serra in Liberté . France, Spain, Portugal. Idéale Audience / Andergraun Films / Lupa Film / Rosa Filmes.1.85:1, 132 min, 2019)—both the film and the video art installation, first exhibited the same year at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, under the title Personalien —alongside Roland Barthes’s reading of texts by the Marquis de Sade, proposing a conceptual juxtaposition between Barthes’s approach and the aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions of Serra’s work. Barthes advocates for a purely formal interpretation of Sade, privileging structure over narrative or moral positioning, and engaging with such elements as the perpetual construction of libertine language, the defence of impossibilia , and humour, among others. The composition and fragmented discourse of Liberté resonate with this framework, revealing a cinematic logic that resists conventional storytelling and undermines superficial understandings of artistic and sexual freedom. At the same time, the article highlights how Serra’s work, operating on the threshold between cinema and video art, incorporates performative elements that intensify the viewer’s hyper-awareness of their position in relation to the screen. By intertwining formal optics with a visual and rhetorical analysis of the film, this study unpacks a conceptually unstable and ambiguous artwork—at once serious and playful, abstract and corporeal, present and vanishing.