interviews
![Interview for TUSH magazine
You are a very young couple, usually couples become more similar during the
years, also visually. But it seems to be the concept of your relationship.
Does loving your partner also accomplish the love for yourself?
I may say that it was like that at the beginning, but love have different faces and when it fade you don’t even realize it. Loving your pater accomplish the love for yourself in the same measure that aversion your patner acomplish the aversion for yourself. You usually tend to identify yourself with the person standing in front of you, when it’s love you use to be the same thing the same body the same soul but when in the mirror you see your antagonism you tend to use the same army you’ve been wonden with. Relationship is a delicate balance, and when the mirror broke all you can do is explore the dark side of it.
Does your artistic collaboration work the same way?
Art is the only safe place where the fractures are filled, where there’s no need to fight, where we can still be perfect.
The images we are doing are our way to bring to life the innocence we’ve lost, a balanced duality.where we find ourself at our best.
Do you project yourself on each other?
I will answer to this question with an estract for our up coming book –Private Album- curated by Peter Weiermair,
Wich is an intimate visual diary (snapshot) of our life together with parts of my texts. it will be out after the summer.
I always thought i loved you cause you are my mirror, cause we are the same but in a spectacular way.
I thought i was watching you but i was just staring at myself. Not that i knew..
And you do the same, until a break comes through and for a second we understand we are looking in the wrong direction.
What is the motivation for your work?
The motivation come from a costant research of ourself trough the relationship that tide us together. We don’t feel part of a movement or a school or even a generation, we find eachother in the dark and we try to old to each other.
the structure of the duo stand for us as a contemporaney way to intend the group. We don’t see ourself in that homoerotic or erotic photography scene that is so popular right now. Been erotic is not our point. Our aim is create strong and interesting images that can comunicate a concept, reaching first the viewer’s feelings than his brain.
In what way are your pictures private, are they supposed to be private?
I won’t say they are private, but intimate, cause we stage the energy that exist between the two of us. For that reason we don’t work with assistents or crew, every image is the result of ourself. We play through our bodies something that we feel close to our bones but that doesn’t belong exclusivly to us, we embrace messages that are universal in our intimate way.
In what way are your pictures reflecting your relationship?
All our images can be seen in a cronological order as a story of our dynamics as a couple.
Aware of it or not, it’s happen all the time that the picture we are working on reflects the deeper aspect of ourself. Even those we are not ready yet to admit.
Watching our images is like a theraphy where we see projected on a photographic print the twisted dynamics of our relationship. I don’t think nobody can really read this if it doesn’t know us and what’s happening, but if i want it or not every photograph we produce show to ourself a direct image of our dynamic at that very moment, raw and with out the filter of illusions and hope . It’s like the image try to teach us something. Sometimes when i finish the post production i’m shocked. i just watch the picture and cry.
Have there been moments when the artistic transcription helped you to
recognize and solve problems in your relationship?
Sometimes just helped to recognize a problem, but even if we see there’s a wall in front of us we don’t understand until we crash into it. In this prospective the artistic transcription of our relationship remain a message that we aren’t able to listen, what is help us is create together, as if in that moment we can feel part of the same soul again. The artistic process of creativity is therapeutical
Is there a message behind the portrayel of your intimacy? If so, what kind of?
There’s a message, but it’s not our job to expain it over and over, when we create something it doesn’t belong to us anymore, we put it out there and people find their own messages,
When you try to espress a pure feeling through an image you should let people free to relate to it in the way they feel to, we can indicate a direction, then the person is free to go there and get what he feels.
A generic message we belive in is that if your feeling is real and pure nothing can be unconfortable or deprecabe if it comes from there.
Even the most homophic and conservative people i’ve met that came across our art, told me surprisly that they perceive the grace of it, and they understood it. That was very soddisfying.
Where do you draw the line between art and pornography?
we strongly defend our work from the accuse to be pornography, not cause we have something against pornography,not at all, but because it’s a sort of mistification, it’s the wrong category to which consider our images.
The main distinction is that pornography follow a centrifugal motion that condense all the interaction with the viewer on a fulcrum that is and always will be the sexual act and the exitation. Instead our images function with an opposit dymamic.
they rather follow a different motion that it’s centripetal, it may starts on a sexual act but then it goes further, broadening its fruition among, emotions, miths, citations, and even along the elegancy of the black and white, the armonic compositions and throught our personal universe wich is an imaginary where we are the subjects and the ‘shaper’.
The senses and the sexual desire of corse have a big part in our work because it’s our real intimacy. We consider our bodies as the field where to start the discussion and our aproach to the world and its values.
That’s why sex in our work is never ludic, funny or ironic, as it is often presented in the last years in art or fashion photography, sex for us is damn serious, it’s almost political.
All we do is trying to assert the weight of our bodies.
Describes the sexuality shown in your art also your own private sexuality?
You provoke with your work, that seems to be an important approach for you?
We don’t think about provocation when we create an image, we just think about what we like, what we are used to do, what for usi s a way to comunicate something.
Do you think gay sexuality and showing off fetishes is provocative?
Is it still shocking nowadays?
Nothing is really provocative, and there’s no point to be provocative nowadays, it just became another aspect of the mainstream fashion, it’s aim is not liberate people minds and bodies but show a superficial way to be cool.
To make a clear example with Gaga this attitude of ‘ underground coolness’ and provocation came to its peak and revealed itself as the best alliance that mainstream corporate pop culture ever had,in this prospective every signs are empty and without any other connotations than the ahestetic one, so pretending to be iconoclastic paradoxicallly just beacame a silly celebration of all the icons, where all the images weight the same, and good and bad have the same value. the consequences is a useless nichilism that doesn’t comunicate much, it doesn’t liberate people consciousness or propose something new. It’s a manieristic game of a culture that realize is walking on a dead end road.
Provocation is for everybody, being poetic and meaningfull is for a few.
We try to stick in the second category.
In your pictures are always spiritual and religious references, is there a
correlation between religion, spirituality and sexuality to you?
Sure, from my point of view what religion and spirituality are talking about is the connection with yourself and your feelings. Wich is the essential part for a human being to develop himself and feel complete. It seems that modern society substitute happiness for something different for something like -being confortable-. There’s a loss of touch in people attitude towards life, we miss the point most of the time of what we should be to feel good.
Be close to yourself and your feeling, that’s the final message of all the religions, even if they stop to understand it and they choose to have power and control instead of remain a philosofical guide, they misses the point as well when they started to build a repressive culture around it.
Being close with what you are, with what your really feelings are is what i percive as a spritual tenision, the force we have inside, the one that people identify with god, it’s a magical feeling that we have when we truly are being ourself. And ovviusly sexuality and love occupied a special place in that.
It make us close to our self, our feeling, so i could say closer to ‘god’.
Sex It’s a sort of holy experience cause you arrive to be in contact and comunication with yourself through the meeting of the other. So yeah i think it has a sort of spiritual value for me, real and pure feelings genuine and healthy emotions is what i looking for in our work and our life, and in a deeper level i guess they always been the subjects of religion.
Do u individually work on your own art projects?
Sure, as i said there’s no one else include in the project, not even on the set when we are shooting. It’s always the 2 of us and the camera set on timer.
We take a very long time to each images we produce.
What do you really want to achieve with your art?
I guess finding the way to rapresent a pure feeling.
What are the most important conditions for a relationship?
Be trasparent and honest, the truth is always the path to follow, not illusion or false images.
Interview for Dazed and confused
You need to click about a bit on Berlin-based artistic duo Luigi and Luca's homepage to get to actually see any of their work. Once you do get there, you're hit with an over 18 warning. The images that ensue on Luigi and Luca's site are the fruits of their working and personal relationship with some certainly warranting that initial warning. They are without a doubt homoerotic but always make you question the composition, the idea behind the image and what was going through Luigi and Luca's heads when they were making that image. Still, their work has gotten them into some sticky situations; a French magazine was banned in Switzerland for publishing pictures of them pissing. They've been faced with police interdiction at the Mexican border for carrying prints, which were considered pornography, and as a result, they were not not allowed to enter the country.
Whilst they call themselves visual artists, they're also quick to embrace codes of fashion photography having worked with Frankie Morello on campaign imagery, a relationship that will carry on for next season. Taking that into consideration, Dazed shot Luigi and Luca as models for the July issue at painter Hans Peter Adamski's studio in Berlin. Given that Luigi and Luca are used to working by themselves, creating and controlling their images, they were happy to be styled by Robbie Spencer and shot by Holger Homann and we show the extra shots from the shoot here and find out more about their working partnership...
Dazed Digital: How did you first come together and what made you decide to start making these images in the manner that you do?
Luigi: It happened in a very spontaneous way, we didn’t plan it. I was a photographer and Luca used to model for me; when we started our love affair two years ago, it just made sense to reverse our energy and our relationship into an art project. One other reason is that we’d been modelling as a couple for other photographers, but we wanted real control on our representation in order to express our view and find an aesthetic where we could really reflect ourselves. So we started to take pictures of us ourselves. Photography is the way we talk about themes that we care about. Our primary need is the quality of the image and the idea beneath.
DD: Why is it that you don't use any external crew?
Luigi : ‘Cause it’s all about the two of us. Assistants on the set would be a problem, I do not like to deal with people, it’s distracting. I want the final image to be a product of our strength without any external help. Everything begins and ends in the intimate space that exists between us that is mental more than physical.
Actually we do not even meet on the real set, our images are a collage of different images; we set the tripod then I take pictures of Luca and Luca of me. I create the final image, the one we had in mind, in the editing process by choosing and shaping all the elements according to my vision. The place where we meet is an ideal space that didn't exist in reality but just in our minds.
If we consider the status of photography , i mean the main specific aspect of its language, we can see it described in the well known sentence of Roland Barthes -Every photograph is a certificate of presence-.
The specificity of photography is determinated by the physical presence of a referent in front of the camera wich is the contingent. As Barthes said every photos are a document of something that –it’s been- and it was present in front of the camera at that moment.
I would say that through our creative process we wanna make a different statement.
We wanna say that our photography is a certificate of a presence of something that -it is-.
Our photos are a rappresentation of ourself out of any time line.
We are image manipulators but that doesn’t mean, especially after what I just said, that we find our manifesto in digital photography’s new possibilities, even if that is our elected medium. Actually, our process is similar to the one used in England in the late 1800s by the fathers of pictorialism, Gustaf Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson. That’s our reference in the history of photography if I have to choose one.
In our process we are avoiding the description of the contingent and the casual elements that we don’t control cause we want to reflect an idea and a deeper representation of the reality. Most of the situations in our photography are staged and they don’t even exist on any set (except the ones were we have sexual interaction), but that doesn’t mean those situations are fake; they are even more real and pure.
I don’t want to sound too abstract or metaphisical, wich is kind of lame, but i would say that at the base of our images there’s a mythopoetic action with wich we shape our personal universe and we make it real.
DD: Since you like to be in total control of your images, how did it feel to be photographed by Holger and styled by Robbie?
Luigi and Luca: It was interesting be on the spot of the ideas they came up with. In this case we were in their hands, and we liked the results they got. The concepts were brilliants, beside the ones published on the magazine we did many others. It was like seeing ourselves from another point of view. It was fun, they did a good job.
DD: How much of your work is informed by wanting to deliberately push the boundaries?
Luigi and Luca: Well, as I said intimacy is where our creative processes start and it’s the place where we like to represents ourselves. People are more real in their intimate behaviour, and sex is something we always think about, I guess like everybody else. Our images just reflect the way we are without having those censorship problems that don’t belong to us.
We don’t think that the majority of so called “erotic photography” is that interesting. Usually it just plays with the viewer, suggesting a sexual act that it doesn’t show; that’s a dishonest bogus sexuality, because it plays safe, walking on the boundaries but at the same time suggesting what’s going on from the other part of the wall. What’s the point of doing that? We do not think we have to respect boundaries we don’t have if we had to talk about how we are. We just represent what we like. But sex is never the fulcrum of our images, it’s just an honest beginning of our poetics.
I don’t want to say that we like images just because they are explicit, for example I think that Terry Richardson’s work was interesting for the first 5 minutes. He shows an ironic and lucid sex that is bogus as well, and it seems it just wants to be funny and irreverent. We like the images where sex is something serious, and poetic. In general it’s hard to point out contemporary artists that we consider really inspiring to our creativity.
One of our latest work “Don’t you smell? Dad is dead” is about our situation as young artists that have had a hard time to recognize a model or an inspiration in the recent past or present. We feel like orphans, as if we haven't found any valid artistic fathers.
DD: Where do you sit between fashion and art... ?
Luigi and Luca: Fashion is great because it’s closer to your skin and your life more than other forms of art. Contemporary art sometimes is too distant and too difficult to interact with. Fashion and art have similar potential of expression even if they are on different levels ‘cause fashion is functional and art never is. I can say without any problems that our art is very near to fashion photography.
The biggest characteristic of fashion photography is the double aspect of presentation and re-presentation, of reality that is basically the characteristic of our images too. This concept was expressed by the sociologist Gerard Lagneau in the 60s when he was writing that the problem of the fashion photographer was to make real an ideal image. Even if with different intentions I guess we go through the same process.
It’s not something we need to take distance from. I think it’s not consequential because the aim of fashion photography is to sell a product, the beauty, the quality, and the value of the images are necessarily corrupted. Fashion is devoted to money as much as art… there’s not a big difference, just that fashion is less hypocritical. For me, the only problem of fashion photography is that the majority of it is crap and unoriginal, but the rare times where it is honest and well done can be really interesting as art photography.
For what concerns our work, I consider the fashion series we did for the talented Carlos Diez or for Frankie&Morello as good and as personal as our main work. We’ve been asked to realize the next Frankie&Morello campaign, and for us will be a pleasure we won’t consider it as a step out of our path.
Published on Dazed and Confuse Digital. July 2009
From Homo Neurotic:
As part of our mission to bring you a slice of the world, via the homo-neurotic perspective, we're continuing a series of interviews in which we feature exciting, new artistic talent. This time around we've jumped the pond to catch up with Italian artistic duo Luigi and Luca. Their photography explores themes ranging from the complexities of modern gay relationships to the battle against sexual repression.Join me for a look.
S: Where are the two of you from and where do you live now?
LyL: We are from Italy; I'm from the north [Luigi], Luca is from the south. We met three years ago in Florence in a cruising club where I was DJing. We lived in Florence, then we moved to Madrid and now we are in the states until November. After that, we do not know; it's another jump in the dark.
S: How long have the two of you been working together as artists and how did your collaboration begin?
LyL: We got together two years ago; I was a photographer and Luca was studying painting at the academy of Florence. After a vacation in the States we decided to convert the energy of our relationship into art; that was one year ago. For now we have just explored the medium of photography but we want to explore more…
S: How do you think your relationship with each other influences your photography?
LyL: Yep, obviously. Every picture is talking about us, about our relationship — even if they can be read in a more general universal way, they are developed as an image of our situation as a couple. So I can tell they have a sort of chronologic order, they are changing and growing up with us. Sometimes we just follow a visual intuition without awareness, but at the end the image is talking about what is happening between me and Luca, our couple's dynamics, our problems, our limits. In a certain way they can be read as a diary, but nobody knows it yet. We just let the photos talk for themselves — they are evocative and surrealist for a lot of people, but in the easiest way they are a metaphor for our situation as a couple. So, if I can quote two of my favorite songs, I would say that love will tear us apart but art will be the bomb that will keep us together. I guess it is working as a therapy for us, especially in this period.
S: What contemporary artists and photographers do you turn to for inspiration for your work?
LyL: We don't have artistic fathers. I won't say we are orphans, but even if we are interested in what's going on in the art scene, we do not take a lot of inspiration. I can tell that without [Robert] Mapplethorpe and [Arthur] Tress, our eye would not be the same — even Greg Gorman, who is a dear friend of ours that taught us a lot about photography and light studio, influenced our black and white and the elegance in our images. And we would say even Slava Mogutin, for the sexual tension in his pictures.
S: Soft-core kink that is simultaneously tender appears as one of the themes in your work. What sort of thought process goes into styling these shots?
LyL: I think it is how I said before — we are what we represent in our images, even if we talk about different themes and how we are related to these themes. For example, in one of our first shots, "Love is a dark hole", we just wanted to express how we feel as a new generation of gay couple, and how we feel different from the past generations (represented by the glory hole in the bathroom). The paradox is in the situation; the linguistic game does the rest. We are always facing a dark hole looking for answers from this part of the wall. It's the questions that are different. Other themes are, for example, the sexual repression of a dogmatic culture, as in "The flying carpet", which has a mix of Islamic elements in it, or for example in "Growing up" we talk about how hard it is for a teenager to know their own body and feelings. The expression 'I kiss my elbow' in Italy means like doing something kinda impossible. So I guess we play with words and situations to build our images. In "Learning" we talk about the process of knowing that for us it involves first of all the body, the awareness of being here now and to subvert the macho, patriarchal, oppressive culture — as we say, it teaches more taking things up the ass than reading the bible.
S: You're represented by Group Model Management. Do you find that involvement in modeling influences your photographic style?
LyL: We've been modeling before starting work together. We like to pose for the projects we like. We weren't working a lot with Group because we do not like give our face to commercial things. We said 'No' many times. We like fashion when it's an expression of an idea. When it's just about industry we like it less and we don't have so much fun. The fashion photography is boring and narcissistic, so we did some fashion shots ourselves for Carlos Diez, a Spanish stylist. The pictures were so explicit that no magazines wanted to publish them, but we had an exhibition in his boutique and it was a success.
S: Your work has been featured in publications, including Pref magazine. How do you feel your photography careers are going so far?
LyL: That's just the beginning; we feel very far from where we want to arrive…
S: What types of projects do you have planned for the next year?
LyL: Avoid the break-up, a short movie (we are working on the screenplay now), making new Fotoromances (our photo story), find a new place to live, quit smoking even if we like nicotine a lot, look for a new haircut, find a good gallery, buy the new Nikon d700, and then whatever comes to our mind.
S: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?
LyL: Oh yep, there's something. The editor of Pref just wrote us yesterday; the magazine was blocked in Switzerland because our pissing picture is against the Swiss law. Now the lawyers are working on that. We defend our art against the accusation of pornography. We think we are very far from offending someone with our images — we are not doing pornography even if we watch it a lot.
-published on Homo-neurotic-
From Platinum Magazine
Where are you currently living? You’ve lived in Italy, Spain, the States, where to next?
At the moment we live in Berlin, we just moved here 1 month ago, and it really seems we’ve found the perfect dimension where we can work, live, and have a great time. Berlin is an incredible receptacle of interesting people, thoughts and lifestyles. It seems like an unusually fertile land where people can express themselves. During the last big economic crisis last century in Berlin, there was an explosion of life, art and thoughts. It may have the same capacity during this coming crisis. I guess it sounds statistical and superstitious but history is boringly cyclical and what is coming next is going to be even scarier.
We just sit here in Berlin awaiting the crack. We were living in Madrid before, but that city is a place for vacation, not for being productive, it’s very provincial in the way it presents itself, we went there because of the socialist government, and for that it was actually great. To taste that advanced political reality and breathe that air, it was very healthy for us after having lived in Italy where the air is heavy and poor. The Vatican and the bad political establishment do their best to disgust me with their positions. We won’t live there anymore.
During the last year, we spent a lot of time in San Francisco. There the atmosphere is great, they are more conscious of how to use the body and of physical interactions, you can really smell freedom on the street and at the parties. We met beautiful people there and we were very productive, we were about to go through the bureaucracy to get a green card, but then we decided we like Europe better.
How did you get into the industry?
The industry found us. We prefer to be outsiders and just realize the images we like, following our needs and our feelings.
How do you describe your work? Do you think it’s rebellious?
It’s hard to describe our work. Sometimes I do not even think it’s necessary, what our research is about is a personal representation of what we feel and believe, and on a second level it’s a representation of our intimacy and relationship, usually people are not aware of it but there’s a sort of chronological order in our pieces that express all the faces of our relationship. I don’t think our work is rebellious, cause it doesn’t intend to be that way, we present what we like and what we are feeling comfortable to show, so in a way for us it’s very normal, being rebellious is something challenging, doing what you like is not, it is just being ourselves without expectations. People can see in our images what they like to see – we just see our truth. And it may be that it is rebellious and intentioned to change society and its prepackaged values.
Your work exploits sexuality, it clearly shows deviances of people’s approach to sexuality, why is there such an interest in this?
Sex is part of our imagery cause it’s an important part of our life, and I bet to everybody else’s as well. But sex, it’s not the main point in our art. We have had to defend our works from pornography accusations many times, but actually it’s hard for us to believe that a sexual act is pornography anyway. As you can see in our images, the representation of our physical communion is more a poetic act full of suggestions and life. Pornography is just a centripetal talking that speaks about itself; our images are better a centrifugal talking that speak about beauty and life. If we wanted to do something shocking, our images would be much more different, but our intention is to talk about beauty and life, and I guess it’s what people like about our work.
In your portfolio, you guys mention that you have no assistants or crew people with you on set; and you guys take each other’s pictures and then edit- can you tell us why you prefer this setting? And is this procedure taken in all your pictures?
Our work is an expression of our intimacy and ourselves; anybody else on the set would be redundant, so it’s always just the 2 of us. Usually I set up the shot and I take pictures of Luca, then Luca takes pictures of me, and later I assemble the various pictures that can be 2 or more in the editing process.
What we show is a representation of a reality that is not actually what is happening in front of the camera but what we think about reality. Our images are ideas and we meet on this mental level that is a redefinition of a space and a redefinition of the real through its manipulation. The only images that don’t follow this method are the ones including explicit sexual acts, but the point is that our images should fit our idea of reality and not just the real itself.
You guys are also models do you have a favorite designer to work for? Or what about to work with?
We stopped modeling for agencies. We do not like doing commercial shootings cause we have no control on the images or the concept, and usually fashion photographers are doing something far from our tastes.
So we do not like to represent crappy ideas. We do model for Greg Gorman often in Los Angeles and a select few photographers. If we have to do a fashion shooting we do it ourselves, in our style, just the 2 of us, we did collaborate with Carlos Diez, Frankie Morello and others… That’s how we do our “commercial” modeling.
What’s the next step in your career?
We are trying to produce our own line, for our pictures and ourselves. It’s always frustrating following everybody else’s ideas, cause it’s always hard to fit in those…. So we are just following ours.
-Published on Platinum Magazine-](interviews%20_files/shapeimage_1.png)
