There is no formula for Nuovi Mondi, no reliable unit of measure of evolving art languages. Frequent dialog and interaction with young artists is really the most essential ingredient. After spending some time in Venice, I decide to talk with Niccolò Pagni (Livorno, 1996), a visual artist, curator and graphic designer by training, who lives and works between Venice and Livorno. His practice moves between publishing, sound design and archive as an exercise in collecting and recontextualizing sounds and images. Through introspective processes, he explores the concepts of memory and nostalgia to create spaces for reflection, contemplation and care.
Camilla Boemio: We met in Venice, a city known for its stationary yet capillary nature, where ‘everything happens’ and then moves on to other shores. We had started talking about how you met artist Marco Fusinato at the Desastre exhibition, in the Australian Pavilion during the 59th Vernice Biennale. Do you count him among your teachers or among influential encounters you have had in your artistic development?
Niccolò Pagni: My efforts in the last years have focused a lot on the recontextualization and reinterpretation of archive materials, mainly multimedia contents. The element of disturbance and signal corruption has always been, though almost unconsciously, central to my dialogue with images and sound. Coming into contact with DESASTRES, by Marco Fusinato, was a memorable jolt; it made me suddenly aware of how central the concept of noise was to my own artistic search. The continuous bouncing of saturated feedback, in that room, lit by an epileptic montage of images, signified a kind of cathartic moment in which I became aware of how substantial, even in my work, chance and free connections were, and of what, from that moment on, would become the cornerstone of my artistic efforts, namely the generative quality of the corrupted or low-resolution signal.
CB: What does Venice mean to you?
NP: Venice is an island and as such is a separate and distant, and in some ways anomalous, reality. It has an urban conformation and characteristics that compel a quieter and less frenetic pace of life than most European cities; there are no cars and the streets are crowded with people, children, walking dogs, and human contact is unavoidable. Certain features make this environment the most suitable place to avoid (though never entirely) the pressing and irrepressible flow of information that has afflicted our lives for some decades now.
I often think of the biological implications of the island. In the evolutionary field, clear separation from the continental reality results in the triggering of unique, stand-alone mechanisms. The same, I imagine, can happen culturally as well, triggering archipelagos of unrepeatable ideas, and it is reassuring to know that somewhere there is the possibility of experiencing an environment that is at the same time both enclosed within itself and open to the world.
CB: What does creating art in a collective mean to you?
NP: Two things essentially: sharing and compromise.
With Collettivo Cuore I experienced a very intense moment of growth and inquiry. The relationship that was created with Giulia Fegez and Elena Roccaro allowed me to know myself more deeply and to share with greater freedom, and without fear of judgment, some very intimate aspects of my life. Together we explored in depth the concepts of emotionality and nostalgia in relation to childhood. This led us to develop a certain mutual empathy that was inevitably reflected in our work: from the start it was pure emotion, a heterogeneous and fluid flow of consciousness and memory, which we offered to our audience.
Frame from the video Se mi fermo forse sono io by Collettivo Cuore, Venezia, 2022.
Installation view of Occupazione Sonora by Collettivo Cuore, Venezia, 2022.
CB: The recent project created by Celeste, the non-profit pro- apocalyptic space inside a laundromat, seems significant to me in your journey. Can you tell us about it?
NP: How to wash your tail and get rid of stains is the third chapter of the episodic narrative Heartbreaker, a collaborative project in partnership with Alice Pilusi. The story tells of a mermaid, the artist’s alter ego, who, through a tortuous path full of pitfalls, aims for success and personal fulfillment without, however, failing to leave along her path a trail of innocent victims, as well as fighting an interminable battle with the innermost and most vulnerable aspects of her own self. The aesthetic is sweetened and plastic, an aseptic yet colorful environment, saturated and fragrant.
We are in a liminal space, a laundromat: neon lights, washing machines, vending machines, and everything is so perfect, all too much so. The floor, however, is flooded with a viscous, iridescent substance, are we inside a business or a spiritual source? Surely by reading the brochure on the counter the audience will have cleared their doubts, or perhaps they will have gotten lost in the gossip of the mermaid in dialogue with Andrea Croce and in the advice on how to spot-clean a dirty tail, or they will have been mesmerized by the melody of voices and hyper-typical sounds resonating in the space.
Frame from the teaser Corri se senti le sirene, Heartbreaker by Alice Pilusi, Niccolò Pagni, Paloma Pertot, Livorno, 2023.
This work is a window into a parallel world, it is the portal to noclip into one of the endless levels of backrooms -the realm of Heartbreaker– or perhaps to return to reality.
Installation view of How to wash your tail and get rid of stains, Heartbreaker by Alice Pilusi, Niccolò Pagni, Teramo, 2023.
CB: The archive, and the use of the latter, has a strong impact on your artistic practice. How do we recover lost stories, or how do we bring a story back to life by changing its narrative?
NP: The concept of the archive has always belonged to me, the idea of collecting images and sounds, sampling the reality I live in and taking small artifacts from it, is a way to better learn some of the mechanisms that govern it. It is like a magnifying glass that allows me to look very closely at just a few fragments, which however contain within them a story and a perspective that escape unnoticed in the flow of data we constantly receive while living. Archiving for me is a contemplative practice, an archaeology of space and time that allows us to give new value to something that has already inhabited the world, but in different circumstances and with different functions. Not long ago, thanks to my collaboration with director Alina Marazzi and the Ri-Prese project, I came into contact, together with the other members of the collective, with some video material, hours and hours of home videos in vhs format. The lives of a set of twins documented from the moment of birth until their departure from the family nest. A parallel story made of glances, smiles and gestures that needs to be shown. Giving new life is not an act of modification but of explication; it is the manifestation of something that is and always has been there but is difficult to glimpse.
CB: How does one activate cultural memory by activating new routes? Through words, images, sounds and objects extrapolated from a context?
NP: I think I have already partially answered this question, but I would like to reiterate that isolating something, grasping it and observing it separately from its context, is a practice that acts as an emotional amplifier, and stripping each word, statement, image or gesture of the masks behind which they are hiding will show them for what they really are. It is obvious that, in the absence of a context, it is virtually impossible to understand what the interlocutor initially intended to express, or the original meaning of what we are observing, but we will certainly discern more clearly the subliminal information and emotional charge inherent in what we have in front of us. In the context of ULTRAVIOLENCE, a work created in collaboration with Ludovico Colombo, Thomas Valerio, Giulia Fegez and curated by Aurora Gerini, we sampled and recontextualized internet aesthetics, excerpts from songs, samples and reflections of the authors, recomposing them into a new narrative. The resulting perfomance seeks, in the continuous modification and reworking of these source materials, to establish a collective dialogue, strongly linked to the sharing of pain in the Age of the internet.
Image from Ultraviolence by Ludovico Colombo, Niccolò Pagni, Thomas Valerio, Giulia Fegez, Gabriele Fegez, Livorno, 2023.
Installation view of Occupazione Sonora by Collettivo Cuore, Venezia, 2022.
CB: The language of art is changing, hybridizing and filtering with new media. What is the language of your generation?
NP: I don’t have a definitive answer to this question, or even a firm opinion, certainly I can identify some aspects that are common to the attitude of many. Fluidity as a concept is permeating many creative disciplines, starting with contemporary art. Being fluid means not being still, fixed, formally and substantively. It goes beyond hybridization, which is mixture, but not necessarily mutability. The ideas of contact and exchange also belong to the term fluidity, which encompasses the perpetual and fertile dynamism of constant change: this seems to me quite representative of contemporary reality. If I had to speak in more practical terms about the mediums and channels through which art is realized, and where, in my opinion, it will reside considerably more prominently than in the present, I would certainly think of the digital world and all that comes with it. From augmented reality, to the metaverse, to the future forms of social platforms, up to scenarios as yet unimaginable and increasingly ephemeral and transient, after all, a projection not far removed from the reality we already experience.
Camilla Boemio is an internationally published author, curator, and member of the AICA (International Arts Critics) and IKT (International), based in Rome. In 2013, Boemio was the co-associate curator of PORTABLE NATION: Disappearance as Work in Progress – Approaches toEcological Romanticism, the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. In 2016, Boemio curated Diminished Capacity, the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
Boemio’s recent curatorial projects include her role as co-associate curator at Pera + Flora + Fauna. The Story of Indigenousness and TheOwnership of History, an official collateral event at the 59th International art exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, which is commissioned by PORT and the state government of Perak, Malaysia 2022; Zoè Gruni: Matherwood curated at Galleria Il Ponte, 2023; and Stefano Cagol: The Bouvet Island co-curated at ETRU Museo Nazionale Etrusco in Roma, 2024 .
