What is the concept behind your practice?

This is really something that I find out as I go along. It’s not the idea of what I want to do that moves things in me, but the suspicion of a vision. I say “suspicion” and it’s the same term I use when I speak of God. I suspect that he exists because my tension is to complete myself unseen. So with works. Indeed, if I may say so, I suspect there is only one work to which I must go, like a body dug up with a countless number of shovels of earth to be removed. All I do is remove ground until that Corps appears. The body is my tool, but as Husserl says, ‘spirits stays where bodies are’. My performances are born in the land where I grew up, they are in close relationship with the location and take place in sacred places, such as woods, forests, consecrated and deconsecrated churches, monasteries. And all my sculptural activity comes to life from the performative one (which itself is inspired by the image photography that recalls the concept of lighting, since I only photograph where I see myself appearing, while paradoxically working to the possibility of disappearance, but this is a long matter, in a graft of human, plant and animal figures. Writing, photography, performance, sculpture: everything is part of a whole language that for me is nothing but an attempt to pair or separate from the world in which the role of the artist is to be receptive, a form of the threshold. I gradually discover my way through the disciplines, because the matter or issues that every time my body poses (since with this practice I work with self portrait and self casting), also solve a formal problem within me. And the search for a form that wavers from mine but that resembles it is, perhaps, the pursuit of a double.

You often talk about your dreams and death, how do these two themes influence your art?

If I look back, I think I’ve been working hard on the idea of wreck, of artefact. Lately in sculpture I have come to a sort of bone age. I build vertebrae, vertebral columns that I move forward and place as if they were a shield in the central cavity of the breastbone. A sort of back to protect the chest. In my native land, digging up was a known practice. It is a Samnites’ land rich in tombs that were found and opened. The finds circulated in town, smuggled. I think this deeply influenced what I do in my job, but I realize that only now. I have been working for a long time on the concept of deposed body, and on resurrection through the appearance of one’s own body in the place where one lives (both with sculpture and self-portrait). We are never present to ourselves until we are reborn. Maria Zambrano used to say, ‘without rebirth, nothing is alive’. So for me and for my works. When I work on the bodies (which are actually my mold), for each body a mold with chalk, I bury them for a while. Now in the studio I have a resonance garden, as I call it, a place that has enough soil to cover a sculpture. I am very afraid of dying without having unearthed myself. Without having made manifest something of which I feel the presence but which is not yet manifest. As if there were an inhuman bottom that once touched everything is clear.I don’t know how to deal with dreams. It’s as if life and dreams were a whole. I’m constantly and continuously wrapped in psychic matter, if this is what you mean. The world has its own laws and I move as I can in the expression, hiding and protection of mine, as if they were animal ones. And so psychically there is like a spiritual hunt between dreams and death, but I could not tell who is hunted and who is the hunter.

What was the most memorable performance you did?

Patientia. That is, patience. Born in 2014 in the forest of Barrea lake in Abruzzo, and then practiced in natural places, in consecrated churches and not, Patientia is a performance of intercession. Before being a performance, Patientia is a wild prayer that approaches very slowly and it is extremely connected to the place where it expresses itself, as a tragic contact with the forces of the living.