I was interested in art since an early age, but I didn’t have any formal art training, and I’ve learnt mostly on the field. My education has been multidisciplinary; I studied psychology but soon realised that I didn’t want to pursue that career. At that time I was playing and touring with several bands, and I had just started making collages and photos. My final thesis in college combined my interest in psychology and visual art; it was about visual perception and optical illusions and how artists had been using this phenomenon in their work.
After that, I decided that I wanted to pursue photography, so I started assisting fashion and commercial photographers. I moved to Milan, where I also worked as a graphic designer for a short time. Since my career began, I’ve been pushing both my artistic research – showing my work in Italy and Europe – and working as a commercial photographer. In 2010, I was invited to take part in the Photo Global program/artist residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York. That was my catch up on art school and the foundation of a new awareness in my practice.

I believe everything you do in your life influences your practice in one way or another, even if it’s only on a subconscious level. By seeing your work in perspective, you realise where certain elements come from. I guess spending all that time on books gave me a method and influenced the way I approach a subject, no matter if I was making portraits or arranging objects in a composition. I just realised how some studies on social psychology influenced my early work, and my research on visual perception might have informed my current project, Digital Deli. Music and architecture have also constantly influenced the way I create my work.

I don’t know exactly. By nature, I tend to fluctuate between extreme opposites, and while sometimes it has been frustrating not to find the perfect balance, I have recently realised that these contradictions could be the starting point of new conversations and that to understand complexity I need to be more open to possibilities.

I would choose a hybrid form of the two! Again, it’s hard to decide, and that’s why I try to reconcile contradictions in weird new forms. Here is an example: in 1984, Ensoniq released the Mirage, the first affordable digital sampler. The instrument combined the possibility to digitalise any audio fragment, tune it on a keyboard and shape its sound through an analogue filter. This combination of the low-res gritty 8-bit sound and the warm analogue filter smothering any digital harshness is the perfect metaphor of how I would like different technologies to interact. The process I use to make my images is a reflection of this analogue-digital hybrid technology. The name of the sampler also reminds me of certain 1980s utopias, which I now see as dystopias, and I find the whole concept inspiring.

In the overwhelming visual scenario we are embedded in, it’s interesting to look at images that are both abstract and at the same representations of that process of abstraction. Which, by the way, is the nature of photography.

My whole body of work explores notions of displacement. With these projects you've mentioned, I used very formal portraits to explore a particular discomfort in my subjects. The fact that they are very straightforward, often nude, and in the same position at the centre of the frame was a way to play with subtle nuances and explore the blurred line between feeling comfortable or uncomfortable in a set place and time. The subjects are vulnerable but also confident, and the work is obviously a projection of personal feelings and emotions.

I am interested in personalities, non-conventional and non-glamourized beauties. I am obsessed with details, and I find everyone’s idiosyncratic features to be very inspiring. I have used a combination of self-portraiture, close friends, and complete strangers cast on the street or online to explore how the access I can get with my subject influences the process of creating my final image.

There are certainly a few recurring strategies in the current conversation about contemporary photography and its identity. I believe one of the most important aspects to explore is the circulation of images. We communicate through images more than ever, and we are all bulimic ‘prosumers’ – producers and consumers – of visual content. It’s a very stimulating but also frustrating time for photography. 

I am currently expanding my latest project, Digital Deli, working on a book, and producing video and music for my Public Access TV show, which will start soon. The project explores the current visual vernacular and the effect of stereotypes on our identity. It’s a way to deal with my conflicting relationship with pop culture.