After receiving his delirious and psychedelic shots, we had a little chat with Pelin Santilli, a surrealist and politically incorrect artist (otherwise what would be the point of having him on Fluffer?).
Who are the protagonists of your set?
They are accomplices, artists, proud women, even mothers… not just asses, tits and things sold as laughing stock to a voyeuristic, bulimic middle class, full of liberism and viagra.
Your nude series is far removed from the standardized and aesthetically oriented idea we find in the usual erotic photo sets: it’s iconoclastic, surrealistic, and desecrating just like your art. It doesn’t portray perfect bodies or models assuming signature poses… and you aren’t a photographer: what prompted you to create this series and to shape it the way it is?
On the one hand there is a chance encounter with a forgotten author, William Mortensen, the inventor of Pictorialsm, namely the pictorial use of a photography, a century before Photoshop. On the other hand there is the zeitgeist, the spirit of time, which is the fierce son of the tremendous defeat of the twentieth century, the postmodern child who touch and crave for everything, who swallows all around him, who materialize every element and commercialize it… and then there’s me, a gaunt japanese loner on a small island in a barbaric sea, who fights an already lost and finished war. My weapons are discordance, dissimilarity and eccentricity… we leave in a rubber dictatorship and you have to be sharp-cornered or to bristle with thorns to not be bounced off. You’re right, I’m not a photographer, like I’m not a visual artist or a performer or an illustrator… That’s it: my poetry is meaning and signifier, its the act of sabotaging the codes and structures of artistic fordism… overspecialization, technicalization and the assembly line of imagination are just shit and I stress this point in each of my creative actions. Young insurgents wrote the phrase ”free and wild” on some walls in Milan. That’s what I mean: I’m a humble narrator who talk about the insurrection of young bodies that will occur… my kind photography is a dissident one which want to jump from the basements to the barricades.
My weapons are discordance, dissimilarity and eccentricity… we live in a rubber dictatorship and you have to be sharp-cornered or to bristle with thorns to not be bounced off.
There is an analogy between the protagonists of your photos and the female characters of your works?
Yes, obviously, I always do the same thing, the same mistake, I chase after madonnas but then I forget their features and, in the vulgar process of reification, my unworthy and lousy hand transform them into grotesque little monsters… then I thought of photographing reality and then transcend it… but, due to my mediocre skills, my photos don’t make me an Helmut Newton, cantor of the empire, but a more humble Pelin, bard of the imagination’s outcasts.
Eroticism is an ingredient that’s often found in your drawings. The sexual element — symbolic at times, pornographic some other times — it’s a major theme in your works, how come?
I live in two worlds: the world of the historical and dialectical method and the world of the hermetical spirit… sexuality is regarded as the key and the gateway for different realities in gnostic and esoteric traditions thus making it into a sacred element who oppose the blasphemy of the material world… that’s why it’s included in my artistic vision. I admire everything that is sacred. I revere the god that the ever transforming human being is and sexuality it’s the most powerful tool of a sorcerer… it’s always been like this.
In a private space the empire unleash every kind of sexual fantasies and identities… but it’s forbidden to keep a sexually explicit behaviour in the public, and therefore political, space.
Italy is in 73rd place for (absence of) freedom of the press so we live in a country who is just “partially free”. Therefore “shooting nudes” isn’t different from “writing without mincing words and without masters”: in the end both of these things will get the axe.
In a private space the empire unleash every kind of sexual fantasies and identities… but it’s forbidden to keep a sexually explicit behaviour in the public, and therefore political, space. The human body remains sacredly obscene if it manifest itself in all its liberating might and that’s one of the worst enemies of the political power’s narrative. For instance, this concept make me think about the Voina’s performances in Russia, which always end up in repressions and imprisonments, just as the ones of the Living Theatre in the seventies.
Pelin Santilli | website
