SAVIOR LUNASTORTA

My photography is quite autobiographical, but without lapsing into useless egocentrism, but the feeling it refers to is very often connected to personal experiences.

Simona Coltello: I do feel an excruciating, unprofessional need to choke you. How the fuck do you manage to keep working with your IPhone for both Photography and Filming, and get away with it?

Savior Lunastorta: This first question is actually very easy to answer: given the fact, that shooting with a phone is a more affordable medium than a camera body, which at this moment in my life i can’t afford! to answer the last piece of the question instead, then, how do i “get away with it” ? in reality very often this condition that favours an obvious quality obviously becomes a limitation, especially when a photographic work has to take a physical form. in recent times, however, I have realised that photography speaks specifically to a well-defined social elite, a class of people who obviously possess well-defined economic privileges! which makes me want to be even more “subversive” in this way of existing, which yes, penalises me, because in fact the choices I can make using an IPhone as a photographic medium are very restricted, on the other hand there is experimentation that I would like to continue to explore.

SM: Your photography expresses sadness that you only see in Eastern European gay porn. Ok i am done with the jokes, sorry. But, truly, it is a theme that explicitly reoccurs throughout your works, even before your recent loss. Is it an emotion you purposefully are looking to research and explore in your art?

SL:  I don’t really know whether to call my photography ‘sad’ i certainly think it’s something that arises organically and naturally! I have always tried to extract, and consequently to bring out, everything that I live inside (obviously I refer to a rather compromised psychic situation), let’s say that this feeling cannot but exist, because my photography is quite autobiographical, but without lapsing into useless egocentrism, but the feeling it refers to is very often connected to personal experiences! so basically I don’t think it’s something that I seek with a will, it exists only because I feel it!

SM: Mental Health is a risky topic to get into but also inevitable nowadays. Art can be therapeutic but also harmful, depending on how you live it. What is your relationship with it?

SL: Mental health is a topic that is still too little discussed in the world of visual art! at least, i find that there are so many stereotypes that unfortunately compromise what could be a more terse view of this topic. my relationship with my mental health is decadent, and it is profoundly fragmentary, in the sense that i constantly have to stitch together pieces of myself so that i have a lucidity that allows me to act later to deconstruct certain parts that often get in the way of my life. it is a complex subject, surely art helps to comb out certain knots that too often weigh down my life! i hope that art is always a means of collectivity and networking, and therefore also of listening, which very often can become a real sort of ‘therapy’.

SM: Of course we can’t avoid talking about Sicily. Each year I am surprised by all the new collectives and projects that are born on that cursed island, but strangely I always find out about them in Milan. Would you describe yourself as optimistic about its role as innovator? Do you think we have the resources?

SL: Honestly talking about the correlation space\arte is very difficult! since the situation here in the south is extremely different depending on the area where you are. i can’t deny that i often felt a need to have a safe radical queer space here, although unfortunately lacking an education to radicality and of course also to the word “queerness” it becomes difficult to survive! but fortunately the internet can become an alternative that is not valid, but acceptable given the lack of physical spaces, that is! i hope for a vivid future here in the south, but i feel that things, at least in the bigger cities, are changing!