Interviewed by Opie Boero Imwinkelried

“I think it’s important not to lose the direction of own research, while remaining aware that
being an artist is first and foremost a responsibility to every single viewer of our works. If
what is created is not logically or emotionally needed for the people who create it, the
artwork is unlikely to be stimulating for the audience.”

- Teatro Deluxe

Opie Boero Imwinkelried: Hello, I’ll start by asking you to intro duce yourselves. How many people work at Teatro Deluxe and what is your history?

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Teatro Deluxe: Teatro Deluxe is an independent and self-financed artistic research project that explores territories of photography, video and performance. Active since 2008 at international level, the group is formed in university thanks to the meeting of the two founders: Claudio Oliva author, filmmaker and photographer and Vera Michela Suprani author, performer and web communicator. Giulia Di Vincenzo, a young designer formed at the “Accademia di Belle Arti” (Academy of Fine Arts) in Rome, the composer and musician Alessandro Oliva and Valentina Vanja Suprani, help organizing: all of them cooperate closely with the group.

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OI: Could you please briefly tell us about your latest projects?

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TD: We are working on the performative project Greeting from Coney Island, which could be summarized as the suggestion of a place told through a body. Currently we prefer to work in non-theatrical spaces such as galleries, museums, houses and urban settings (just on the street Greetings was represented during the Dimanche Rouge # 4) with the aim of giving this body back to reality, choosing every time the most suitable place. It’s very interesting for us, challenging and required the audience reaction that occurs when we present in this way Greetings.

There are also two new photo projects. The first is entitled “Randycat” and consists of three images of women on a roof in New York: the work is characterized as a reasoning by images on the decadence and the desire for rebirth of the city symbol of the USA. The second project, “Gothique”, was born from the will of the group to investigate the real even through the testing of new representation devices: so, a hostel of the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona becomes the theater for a series of photos taken with a modern smartphone. Symbol device of lightning contemporary communication (voice, video, photos, Internet), this tool proves to be increasingly the real, modern snapshots camera.

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OI: Could you explain how you transition among different media–still photos, video and theater?

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TD: The starting point is certainly our sensibility. The first step is to feel which medium would best adhere to our requirements about an idea, for a project, or simply a feeling. Happens that this pressure does not end with the creation of a work by one of the tools we use but, rather, the result did nothing but stimulate the production of a work complementary to the first, in which is precisely the different representation device, and especially the different problems and opportunities related to its use, to build the engine for a broader and deeper development of the subject matter.

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OI: In “Faceless, “you speak about femininity and portray the female body without faces. This strategy tends to disperse or diffuse the gaze towards a multiplicity of elements instead of directing it to a single point. This reminds me of the conception of the female body of philosopher Luce Irigaray, who points out that the female body challenges binary oppositions of the visible and the invisible–the presence and the lack, opposing a multiplicity to the one, the unity of the penis. Irigaray states, “The phallogocentric system generates many binary oppositions; one of which is: penis/vagina/nothing/clitoris/labia. In this binary, the penis is privileged over both zero and multiples. So the opposite of the penis is many different things.”

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TD: I suppose it is correct, in our works (Faceless Project, Feminea – I Animazione), talk about the female body as “contemporary body”, the starting point on which to base an argument as much as possible modern. Hiding the face, we tried to focus attention on the communicative potential of the body, aware that this issue itself goes beyond the gender differences; the use of women’s bodies only is an aesthetic choice that prepares for further arguments about the status of women in the world of image, with particular reference at the unattainability of the proposed models.

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OI: In “Greetings from Coney Island” and “Imperfetta Solitudine,” you explore female prostitution. Could you tell us about Francesca da Polenta?

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TD: The character of the performance Greetings from Coney Island is a prostitute to the extent that represents, embodies one of the most flourishing activities in contradictory and fascinating New York City’s Coney Island, the neighborhood birthplace of the project. What we have tried to achieve through this figure, it was returning the suggestions received during our stay in those places. Mixed feelings, attraction, repulsion, and the mystery of this territory by the sea that can accommodate, over time, one of the oldest amusement parks in the United States, a popular Freak Show, and that can be land of criminal organizations involved in the smuggling of drugs and prostitution. It ‘s also, always, the people beach. We liked that these feelings, this place relived in her, she became the place. Doesn’t matter if the audience knows or not the history of Coney Island, is sufficient for that just a few traces of its mutilated charm arrive to them.

Francesca da Polenta was not a prostitute, actually. She was a medieval noblewoman, daughter of the lord of Ravenna. In the fifth canto of Inferno Dante says that she, the unhappy wife of Gianciotto Malatesta, had an affair with Paolo Malatesta, the husband’s brother. This caused the death of the two lovers, killed by Gianciotto itself.

In the video “Imperfetta Solitudine” (Imperfect Loneliness) Francesca, catapulted in outskirts of Ravenna today, is a being who wanders on the roadside in the impossible search for lost love. Talking about pictures we can say that her loneliness, her unbridgeable inner emptiness, together with her clothing clearly inadequate to the environment in which it stands, are signs of a path that we have imagined of moral and social decay. In this way, the idea that here Francesca probably looks like a prostitute is closely associated to the fact that she, as a result of her “sin”, has been accused of being that.

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OI: How is it like to be experimental artists in Italy today? Could you mention some advantages and disadvantages compared with other European countries?

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TD: Being an artist in Italy today is difficult and very stimulating at the same time. The difficulty in raising money and in entering into quite closed circuits are worrisome aspects, but it is equally troubling to be still and sit on our own positions just denouncing the system weakness without trying new ways through creativity, even going into new territories. The artist’s task is also the following: to experiment on himself possible new routes. So I think that the moments of crisis can, rather should also be opportunities to look forward. In our humble opinion, of course.

We do not know enough about the situation in other European countries to be able to draw up a list of just talk about advantages and disadvantages. I know there are nations more aware of Italy in supporting cultural production and diffusion; speaking with artists of different nationalities increasingly emerge, on the other hand, a common feeling of inadequacy of the states in their ability and willingness to attention to the people who produce intangible assets.

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OI: How do you fund your work?

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TD: Through small fees or expense reimbursement for participation in exhibitions and festivals, and trying to relate with people and institutions that can support our work in various ways: by a year, for example, we are one of resident groups at Kollatino Underground space in Rome, one of the most careful realities to the production and artistic experimentation in the city.

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OI: What advice would you give to other experimental artists?

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TD: I think it’s important not to lose the direction of own research, while remaining aware that being an artist is first and foremost a responsibility to every single viewer of our works. If what is created is not logically or emotionally needed for the people who create it, the artwork is unlikely to be stimulating for the audience.

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The interview is published on http://dimancherouge.wordpress.com/

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