What is your cultural background and what has brought you to a decision to become an artist?

I studied Philosophy at University. I quit because I started to work with photography and music. I was part of the underground dark-industrial-electronic scene in Italy, organizing events in squats and semi-legal industrial places. Then I co-founded the Vicious Club in Rome and Alchemy in 2010. It was a cross over club. Dark, smoky, with a word to mouth way to promote the events. We gave to people transparent small papers with drawings about nature, mostly insects. I was curating the identity and communication all-round. A contemporary gallerist was interested about the club and the scene. He made me understand I was doing artworks, not only flyers. We did an exhibition as a collective and it was an amazing experience. Since then, I started to be interested in contemporary art and I tried to put all my background in what I do. I focus on developing series of works. All of them have a specific concept going with a strong identity about form. Putting together form and substance. The care and attention towards the materials and the creative process must correspond to the dedication towards researching a narrative and a strong, underlying concept. I don’t know which starts first, form or concept. But the inseparable bond between form and substance was one of the most interesting things I studied at University for a philosophy exam. And in general, between white and black, between opposites.

You use to work in series, why? What is it that connects them all in a whole?

Working on series and installations let me explore year by year something different. It is always an on-going process, always a challenge, an experiment. But this must take care about “the fil rouge” connecting all of these series. That is very important. Everything must be connected. Both in a form and substance way (the way the artwork is presented and the concept behind). When I started doing art I had one single concept. A series of glass display cases with insects inside. A psychedelia linked to nature, a beauty based upon cruelty, the result of my godfather’s work with entomology, with which I grew up. I called that BSE (Beauty, Sacrifice, Eternity). Then DUSKMANN Prelude which – as an artistic collective – examines the abstract in the world of stones and the modularity of installations, with a large red stone in the centre like a beating heart; MONOLITH, which attempts to symbolically capture the essence of space (in this case in the villa where Galileo wrote Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems) by way of a light projected onto a glass mould which, filtering through it, creates geometric shadows; FRAGMENTS, time as a fragment. Strips of glass that indicate the past (through images imprinted on the glass, like a collective memory) and the future (colored glass or mirrors that already exist, but are still indecipherable like “memories”). A network of strings in the room also symbolizes an Einstein-Rosen bridge that created links between the walls; and the most recent work that examines space-time and its distortions in a perceptive level: XYZT.SP. Only with years I am feeding my research creating a new series of artworks. It is a slow, long term process.