SAGG Napoli

This house was finished about 10 years ago, I must have been in my early 20s. I remember the whole process, the choice of colours; it was always dinner conversation material. My mother is an architect and my father an urban planner. It was really up to us, to what we were willing to give: I contributed in my own way, my sister in hers, maybe she was less interested in it. The parts of the house I belong to or dwell in more come from my precise choices. The very interesting thing about this house is the selection of the materials. They all go back to specific places of the Mediterranean. Several plasters come from different areas, especially North Africa. There are tiles from Vietri that were tagged by my father’s friends or other family friends. There’s a cabinet made as a wedding gift for my grandmother by my great-grandfather. He was a carpenter, but he didn’t have money to buy wood. Puglia didn’t have so much wood; there were plenty of olive trees but not suitable for building furniture, so he made that cabinet with all the scraps and leftovers he collected on the job. The other meaningful side of the house is structural: There was a time when human labour in Basso Salento was less expensive than buying materials. Today is quite the opposite; thank God, human labour is more valued. It costs more to have something done carefully than buying a piece of wood. This is why the lower floors have vaulted ceilings, ‘soffitti a stella’, while the upper ones have wooden beams: These became cheaper as we went along with the project. I guess the house is a visual history of labour in this part of the country. Something that has changed exponentially during my father’s lifetime. When he was a child, he used to see women weaving bulrush into baskets in the streets; you don’t get to see that anymore. Getting to Santa Maria di Leuca, which is 20 kilometres from here, was a trip you made once a season, the roads were that bad. That affected the sense of time. The architecture of the house is a capsule of such stories.

I try to make it a month on my calendar. There have been times where I was down here way more, but this year is a month. In my head, it’s my safe place. Every time the concept of safe place comes up in therapy, I land in this house. Let’s call it a refuge.

Not always.

I’m seeking for a sense of personal security within collectives, I do desire it, but I often retreat. I try to understand myself through others, and the focus on my family seems a rather obvious choice; it is within reach, immediate. I want to explore the true meaning of the ties between me and them, my being one way and not the other. It’s hard to speak about my grandma; she’s 102 now. I feel I’m getting ready for a different kind of transition.

Yes, she still asks me what I do! I’m not sure she really gets it, but then she forgets and asks again. At least she stopped wondering about other annoying stuff. She asks about work, not about sentimental things or when I’m going to get married. When she came here to Puglia (she can no longer endure the trip), she would see the way I dress, talk, and the way I use the space around me. It became more intuitive. I could tell she was pleased to be lifted by me, as she could sense my physical strength. Some things are left for intuition. Turning 100 was her goal, but that might spurn a new attachment to life. She might want to turn 110 now.

And then there’s Noah Lyles, who just won the 100 metre in Paris. I like him a lot; he’s very performative, and a lot of people can’t stand him because of that. He said something like, ‘I suffer from asthma, anxiety, depression, but I’m the fastest man in the world no matter what’. I feel it doesn’t help that much. It’s a matter of scale. When people appreciate the way I share my ideas on mental health, they do it because I write similar things, but my goals are not so big and competitive—they’re not so intimidating. The narrative of mental health issues as a break between two holidays doesn’t convince me.

Aligning is hard. An important competition is different compared to the Olympics. That’s politics and media choices as well. Each country has a say in picking the athletes, especially when there’s a batch of people who can do the same thing at that level. And the consequences of mental health are different; there are practices where falling is a matter of life or death. In archery, most athletes deal with target panic, but that’s different from falling and breaking your neck. Speaking of politics, what really bothered me was that not a single Italian athlete had the political consciousness not to sail on a boat with Israel. Mental health matters, sure, but athletes must think they are more important than the system they represent. They speak about how they feel but not about a genocide. The spectacle of the Olympics is glorious, but the detachment was making me crazy. The Olympics are like the Biennales, a moment where sport opens up to everyone. But people often comment on sports without knowing athletes had to spit blood to be there. They troll athletes weaponised by one country or another, one media or another, when often, decisions don’t belong to them. I despise the way Angela Carini decided not to fight against Imane Khelif after that gender nonsense, but Imane doesn’t need our wokeness or pity. She’s a stupendous athlete.

It’s complicated—let me brainstorm it with you. I started practicing the bow for Olympic archery. I never approached it apart from sports. I never saw an ancient bow and got a craving for it. In my mind, it was always a contemporary bow. The reason I love it is because I find it to be a beautiful object. There are prints on the wall, and I have an unloaded bow next to the bed. I’m looking at it as I’m speaking, and it’s very beautiful, physically. It’s a nasty tool too, very stubborn. Here’s a quote I love from my gym: ‘Archery is the most modern sport among ancient sports’. A lot depends on your physicality, of course, but not only do you have to be precise, you need to be very consistent and patient as well. Which I am not! I learnt with the bow that I’ve never been consistent with anything. When I was working on a project before, I would just get it done, but now I take my time thinking about it. Maybe it comes with age, but I am more precise. It’s a very unforgiving sport as well. Despite all your training, you’ll never hit the target if you’re not present. It requires absolute lucidity. Art isn’t separate from sports for me. Many things I do with the bow in art reproduce not only its actions/movements but use the setting of a competition or a training session in the sense of acquiring a dedicated space focussed on one single thing. I stare at the bow and remember all the things I must do. It absorbs a lot of my mind at this stage.

And yet, there’s something magical to it. In being able to sustain a physical performance; what we admire, rather than pure body strength, what’s really attractive is discipline. Discipline in others is something I find very compelling, setting a goal and a path for yourself. Maybe you’ll wander and get lost, or you’ll find a parallel path, but you’ll get where you think you’re going. It’s not about being delusional, it’s sticking to your guts. I’ve always been in sports. When I had a mental breakdown at 18, I got lost, I drank, I lost my discipline. I went back to the gym after college, every day. And then art came in. I had intuitions in art: I knew I wanted to use my body to push some arguments forward, and 10 years later, my intuition is still here. And now you can see the shape of the path; my mind adjusted to it, my body too. I quit drinking, and I’m a regular in competitions. The hours I put into art and the sport are equal. When it shows in a body, strength as a form of dedication is beautiful to see. You can’t avert your gaze.

I had a classic education, mens sana in corpore sano, that’s where I come from. My ambition is not to sell my art but to be OK. If I can sell art while being OK, I’m happy, of course. When I was 22, I found strategies for not depending on the art market and its buyers. I started doing fashion, and people said I was a sellout. I felt I was less of a sellout partnering with a brand employing 300,000 people, rather than selling 20 paintings to a single owner who’ll have half of me forever. Modalities are important to me. Sometimes I commission stuff for my installations, and people say, ‘It’s never been done this way, but we’ll try’. We adapt. I’ve found my strategies; my path is true/honest to myself. My relationship with the art market is troubled. I never felt fully included in those kinds of operations. Some things I’ve done and said with my work have created a certain space for younger artists, and that makes me happy. For me, people taking their bodies and minds seriously after they’ve engaged with my work is the best.

I was unwell for a long, long time. It took time to make my well-being real, and I’m a year sober now. At my last show at Zaza’ in Milan, I presented a diagram on the addicted, clear, and clean mind called ADDICTIONS, CHANGING BODY, CRISIS MODE, DESCRIBE EMOTIONS. The exhibition, curated by Milovan Farronato, includes another legend of the Neapolitan art world, Betty Bee. In our joint show, They were born in Naples moonlighting as: models, manicurists, waitresses, archers, bikers, pains in the ass, crazies, fellow and disfellow artists, she had a piece called Lapide which was a kind of headstone. I’m aware of where I am, and this doesn’t mean it won’t happen again. When we go back to not being OK, memories of fractions of time in which we were OK are important. Every time I get back on track, it’s for longer stretches.

I used to live with a brilliant girl in London. She was completely aware of the productive machine where drinking and not being well played a major role: People go to work, annihilate themselves, more drinks, more work, call cabs, more money into that, hours in bed to recover, and no rest at all. It’s an astonishing loop. Sometimes I’m swamped with different competitions and shows in the same cycles, but I’m freed from the idea of totally immersing myself without breath. You think, ‘I’ll dive in and accomplish everything I need to do, and then there are two more events, and then there’s a break’. But the break never comes. I shared this openly with my gallerist, a woman. In the end, I always end up working with women, and I realise that, compared to men, we’re professionals at holding our breath. We live by the strange idea that doing three times what other people do will achieve the same result. I told a woman I was collaborating with that I wouldn’t do it again if she worked so much. I didn’t want to be just another thing she did.

This is central to my relationship with Naples. I was in NYC organising a show with an older artist who’s no longer with us, and he said, ‘I’m not sure whether Naples is our past or our future’. He was violently opposed to the idea of coming back; he always wished for me to be somewhere else. I spent 12 years in the UK; in Naples, time is scanned differently. Mine was an accident too. I was going through a breakdown; Covid came at the peak of it, and it was almost a relief. I know it’s fucked up, but I was so sick that I couldn’t understand how other people could function, so the fact that everyone stopped when I was stopped made me feel comforted. That was the trigger for everything slowing down. I went to Naples and understood that, despite being overactive in London, my ability to produce ideas, to write, the quality of human being I was, was very poor compared to my experience in Naples. The past, the future—it really depends on your own sense of time. 

Humans need pauses, not like pauses in conversation, but when you’re staring at the sea or the sky and can scan time without feeling like you’re its victim. My life in the UK made me a victim of time. I felt it recently in Milan, and it takes nothing to fall back. Your value is what you do and how much you do. London has pockets of weirdness, Milan has none. The artist scene is not my thing. What’s next? Who knows. I don’t want to talk about my work when I walk in a bar. I like talking about feelings.

I think about it constantly. I’m always wondering whether representation and storytelling in Naples are forces capable of retelling and reshaping the place or if they’re just using it as a backdrop. There are plenty of videographers and musicians treating it only as a backdrop, and their work is not so compelling in the end. My take and approach are different; there was a time when my work was mainly focused on making certain subcultures in Naples visible. I wanted to make a political statement, giving them real space in the conversation. That conversation has happened, so I no longer feel the desperate urge to direct your attention to Naples. Summer makes everything crazier over here; it gets overcrowded, and content is no longer produced by locals or researchers, but content comes from anyone.

There’s also a lot of absurd stuff. I wonder why so many people feel entitled to create stories about a city that’s complicated like this one, while locals think about it over and over before even acting. It can’t be helped: If you’re from somewhere else, there’s a level you’re missing. You’re missing the disrespect people have endured for decades. 

Living in a city so exposed to earthquakes builds an attachment to the land that’s different. People are so happy to take photographs in Scampia because it’s so real, while there are 800 people dislocated from their homes in the same spot where Kanye West shot a video. If this city is really that interesting, where are the visitors when people need help? You want to come here and shoot your film? Good for you, but you’re a guest. The responsibility of the representation of Naples, however plural that may be, belongs to us.

My personality was always about doing a lot of different things at the same time. Piano, several sports. I’m curious. I take photos, do DJ sets, installations. From a mercantile perspective, this works. I don’t want to be tied to a single language, but I’m still recognisable. When I set up a new show, I’m not moving from the perspective of being a novelty, I’m not saying, ‘Let’s do something completely different’. I feel I’m carrying on the same conversation, but the media changes. It’s natural for me. I walk on the streets of Naples, and I take a lot of pictures. I take in everything and connect it together. Language falls into a lot of places, but it’s no struggle for me. I’m not sure it’s a quality, but it’s definitely my attribution. As for my voice, I was trained as a pianist, and I have a good ear. I wanted to belong to London, but I didn’t want to sound British. People always ask me where I’m from, even here in Naples! To be in, not being in, this was always in me. I never fought against it.