Fabrizio Spucches Q&A
-First of all, let us begin with the simplest question and at the same time the most complex. How are you?
- Great. Kissed by the incredible Milanese sun this morning. Not even in Sicily do you get a sun like this in January. (Editor’s note, Fabrizio is facing the sun and is literally bathed in light as we speak). I am in a very optimistic phase. I think the best period of my life is about to begin. I always think that, ever since I was born. (laughs)
-Perfect, we cane relate. So, if you had to tell someone who does not know your work who you are, which image would you choose to speak for you?
- I would say the very first photo. Not the first one taken, but the first one conceived. It is an image made during the pandemic, a time when we truly had no more excuses, so looking ourselves in the mirror became almost mandatory, otherwise you risked going mad. That photo, which portrays me in a bathtub, was the first image of the Working Class Virus project, which started at home and then moved outside. That shot marks the moment when I decided how to begin my photographic journey. There I stripped myself bare in every sense and began asking myself why. Whenever you start a path, you have to confront yourself.
-And as a photographer, what are your whys, assuming there is an answer?
- That is exactly the point, there are answers, but they are provisional, transient. Some questions have no answer, and that is how it should be. The search for an answer can itself be the answer.
-When did you start to feel this pull toward photography?
- Late. At thirty. Before that I was probably swallowed up by my mentor Oliviero Toscani, a mentor but also a towering presence. I did my apprenticeship. During that time with him, I never thought of photography as a personal expressive path. But I knew how to wait, and the right conditions eventually emerged to try and begin this journey.
-In your projects, crisis often appears as a revelatory moment, from the pandemic in Working Class Virus, to war in The Last Drop, to the climatic and social catastrophes that run through your more recent works. Was there a moment when you realised your gaze would operate inside the fractures of the present, rather than around them?
- Good question. Let me open a parenthesis. Crisis was the key word of my university years. In 2012, a year marked by precarity, I was in Canterbury doing a postgraduate degree, and I made crisis the central concept of my research. I felt like Fellini in 8½ (Otto e Mezzo). Coming back to us, my works, as you rightly say, somehow confront a social crisis. I have learned never to grow attached to what I make. In fact I always feel a sense of incompleteness, of thinking it could have been done differently. This helps me grow, because those who are satisfied with what they do remain on the surface. Recently, with No Way, a project about migration, I have realised that this drive probably comes from my experience with Oliviero Toscani. Being with him felt like being with a superhero. I truly believed we could change the world together. Through him I perceived a sense of radicalism, almost of patriotism. I remain faithful to that approach, but I also think the time has come to address more personal, introspective themes, leaving social themes behind, at least for a while. My next projects will move in that direction.
-Let us talk about your project “Souvenir”. You choose an incredibly powerful symbol like the Madonnina and immerse it in the Darsena of Milan, turning an identity icon into a warning sign. How important is it for you to work with shared symbols, and where does the boundary lie, if it exists, between provocation and responsibility?
- Improvisation matters, but it is also a constant process of reasoning, observation, and reflection. Everything started from a request, in this case from a humanitarian association that asked me to create a project about climate change. At that time I felt like Greta Thunberg. I proposed placing a replica of the Madonnina in the Darsena in Milan, so that it would paradoxically look as if the city were flooded. The goal was to activate a fundraising campaign, it was 2022, for Pakistan, which was completely struck by a natural calamity and it was completely underwater. Here we return to the theme of crisis, because at a certain point this entire project, set up with a significant economic investment, everything organised, the mayor ready to come and take the first selfie, collapsed two days before the launch. Unexpectedly, Monsignor Borgonovo from the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo blocked it all, and I found myself alone. With a deep sense of injustice, not only for social reasons, obviously, but also on a personal level, allow me to say that. After so many resources invested for a good cause, because of the whim of a single person, nothing happened. Yet censorship is often a blessing in disguise. I start questioning the concept of commodification, which Borgonovo accused me of, and I went into their shop under the Duomo and discovered that the Madonnina existed in every possible form, even on liqueurs, on the Duomo sparkling wine, on perfumes, and so on. I bought a Madonnina for nine hundred euros and carried out the installation illegally. That is how the project evolved, in a very playful way. Unfortunately I cannot share the details, but in spring there will probably be a small development.
