Luca Buvoli, the first in our series, is – among the artists selected – certainly one of the more established. He has lived and worked in the United States for over 15 years.

When and why did you decide to become an artist?

“As a child I was very introverted, dedicated to drawing, and honestly quite good; in particular I was completely taken by the episodic language of comic strips. My dream was to create and publish my own series of comics. The, in the middle of my studies, at the Accademia di Venezia, I discovered that contemporary art was so rich in tools and forms that would give me a chance to communicate with the rest of the world. – even if in a filtered way – more than the existential comics that I was working on at the time.”

Participating at the Venice Biennale is one of the most prestigious acknowledgments for an artist, how did your participation in the exhibition come about?

"The curator/artistic director of the Biennale, Rob Storr, had seen and shown interest in my work at various exhibitions in New York in the past. Some years ago he had MoMA buy two of my large sculptures for their permanent collection. When he came to see me last November, he was very taken by the video “Velocita’ Zero” (Zero Velocity), a video animation created thanks to the collaboration of various experts on pathologies of language. I had recorded different people suffering from aphasia or dysphemia while they read the Futurist Manifesto by F.T. Marinetti. Their slowed speech – transformed in my fragmented animated sequences – reflects the efforts and tension of the readers trying to make the text theirs and render it fluidly, and reconsiders the value of speed and aggression."

As soon as he saw it, Rob instinctively asked me: Can you show this work in the first room of the Arsenale?  Is there a relationship between your work and your Italian origins?

"I definitely think so. The most recent work, as I described before, reconnects directly to Futurism.

In the current project, I wanted to analyze the strong impact of mass media and propaganda techniques, remembering how these were used by Mussolini in the Fascist era, projecting them in the context of the current media situation, which has reached peaks of pathological alarmism."

When and how do your personal life and your personality affect your projects? And how does this translate into your aesthetic choices?

"They are always entwined – it would be impossible for me to separate them – or even identify them. Comic books, philosophy, psychoanalysis, swimming, meditation, art, New York, history, running, and a myriad of other stimuli and experiences that I feel are inevitably filtered by my senses and my vision of the world. I leave the role of vivisecting my projects to an anthropologist or semiologist or whomever else is interested."

What do you want to be said about your work?

"What I don’t already know. Ideally though, before talking about them, that one would spend some time observing them. "