Jacopo Benassi (1970, La Spezia) is a photographer, performer, and internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist. His punk attitude, characterized by rare radicality, imbues his poetics, works, and life itself. Mentioning all his projects and his journey in a didactic manner would be reductive; however, here is his organized biography. Alternatively, let’s get in the lively and pulsating disorder of this interview: welcome.

I believe that your production doesn't grant peace but exceeds chaos. Speaking individually about your works would be reductive. Rather than discussing art, I would talk about attitude and ways of being. Your poetic seems chaotic and brutal to me. Where does this energy come from? What purpose does it serve? How does Jacopo Benassi position himself in the world? How does Jacopo Benassi live?

First of all, I'll tell you that all this confusion, which is very punk, actually represents who I am. In fact, in recent years, I understood that I was repressing all this confusion, in the sense that I was perfecting it, improving it. Instead, I realized that my work is based on imperfection. So, let's start from there. All my work stems from who I am, from the culture I have, which doesn't come from academies or solely from the art world, but from the underground, that culture of the late eighties. I used to be a car mechanic, and I remember that one day, at that time, Renzo Benzo, the singer of the Fallout group, told me that I could also do art. From there, I had fun diving into art, without studying. However, I was perceiving everything around me: Bad Trip, Burroughs, and in general the underground culture of that period. I come from a culture that is disappearing. I was not born genius or talented. Let's say that my talent was to perfect my imperfection, not to be perfect. So, I work on this, on renunciation and imperfection. I was born a photographer, and - although today I feel less like a photographer - photography allows me to be who I am: a performer, a more complete artist.

Why did you want to surpass the limits of photography? Why did you feel the need?

I was fortunate enough to be born in a provincial city like La Spezia and to have had a great photographer as my master, Sergio Fregoso, and with him his daughter Sara Fregoso, who gently accompanied me on a path not only technical but also cultural. Becoming a professional photographer, I moved to Milan for a while, collaborating with Rolling Stone, GQ, and meeting figures like Carlo Antonelli and Michele Lupi.

In '96, I came out as gay, at the age of 26. I had always been, and so I decided to come out. This thing went hand in hand with my way of seeing things because I remember that at that time I realized that the flash's light was my light, a light that captured things. I could no longer photograph without flash, sometimes it becomes a limitation. However, this renunciation led me to be rigorous in my work and at the same time to have a certain recognizability.

Subsequently, in the digital years, I too followed this transition and published a great book with an advertising agency: this book, closed and packaged, was the occasion to understand that I had to start over and embark on a new path. At a certain point, driven by an almost physical need, I got in touch with the Galleria Minini through Antonio Grulli, a curator, and then exhibited in a group show with Dan Graham, Vanessa Beecroft, and Roger Ballen. This exhibition allowed me to get in touch with Galleria Francesca Minini, from which a studio visit and a collaboration lasting six years ensued. I must say that working with such a gallery and with artists and curators like Antonio has influenced not only my work physically but also in terms of ideas and approach, even though my work compared to photography has changed not because photography no longer worked, but because I felt the urge for a physical change. I can't have ideas, I hate them, and this period spent in agencies and here in Milan made it even clearer.

So I left Milan and returned to La Spezia, hating ideas and working more on what comes out of me, on what my body suggests to me. The studio was perhaps not a meticulously designed environment, but it was a physical space where there was the saw, where I could work on my frames, and it was there that I was reborn, for the fortieth time, with the awareness of being an artist before being a photographer, while continuing to express myself through photography. Cutting events, even going against the tide and challenging the world of photography, I have always tried to experiment with new paths. Once I would never have imagined putting a photo with a cut glass or overlapping a photo on a painting. It was a fundamental transition because for me photography was that of Tillmans and Juergen Teller, placed there, even printed with pins, unusual in the veins of the '90s. It was precisely that kind of photography from the "don't touch me" series. There was anti-reflective glass, while I wanted people to look into my work. So in my works, you can see anti-reflective glass cut, covered, layered with other paintings.

Your performances mix digital, electronic, and above all organic logic. The physical is powerful and prevalent in your performances, so they involve the viewer a lot, insofar as it's not like a still image, not like a video, not like anything. It's truly impactful. So, what do you try to convey to the audience?

I would rather ask what the audience conveys to me and why. First of all, I had never thought of finding myself on a stage or in front of people performing. Because the photographer knows that he is a screen. The camera has always been, as Roland Barthes said, a screen that allows you to see things filtered.

Anyway, yes, for me it was unthinkable to be on a stage. But after a five-year experience with a club I had in La Spezia, called Bitomic, where I organized concerts and performances with artists from all over the world, and after documenting for five years the life of this place, with interviews, videos, photos and audio recordings, I developed an archive that will soon become a book or something similar. Why did I open that place? Why did I leave Milan after four or five years? I couldn't do it anymore, it was changing, Milan was changing me. So I came back and started from scratch, producing fanzines under the club. From there I started again. In the end, however, I felt the need to get on stage, to do something that also involved photography. Initially, I asked Kim Caleri, a performer from Prato, to do a show with me, with photography, and we did it.

It's called "No Time to Yet": I stood in the middle, took photos with the audience in the middle, the audience became the dramaturgy of the show. That's where my journey began. Then I started doing things alone on my body, undressing, playing my body with the microphone, something I would like to do again as soon as possible.

And little by little, I overcame this, always through photography, creating an action that self-documented, that was a document. The photography I do is photography that creates a situation. I always behave like a photojournalist, like when I go out to photograph around, taking photos as if I had guns pointed at me because my attitude, both in painting and in art, is that of a photojournalist in a minefield.

There is not too much reflection in my work and performances. In the latter, I have a non-theatrical attitude, if for example, I fall I don't care, I am what I am. This thing was born a bit from a word said by a great choreographer, Trisha Brown, who in a video also says "falling is dancing". I took this sentence and made it a motto in my work, in the performance. Everything that happens is not premeditated in general, especially when there is an audience. I don't wonder what the audience thinks, because the audience is an integral part of the performance. In fact, I leave the cameras to the audience, with my apertures, with my positions that they already know, I leave the cameras to two, three, four people from the audience, for example with Burt Alkèzar walking, I gave to six people from the audience. All these people become my clones. I clone myself, so it goes beyond photography, going from "I self-portray things" to "I self-portray with clones".

I try to make something happen that can become everything, starting also from music, from sound. From there, the fact that I started taking instruments because I wanted to start making sounds in some way was born, and even there I understood, as in art, that I had to not try anything, because either I play and become Mozart, or I become a good pianist, a good guitarist, a good DJ, a good producer of electronic music, or I go the other way. That is, as I said, I fall, and what happens, happens. So I play for pure incidental impact with the instrument. I create a bit of disorder, as if I were bringing music into something else.

So the audience becomes the performance, because in the end I have photos of the audience that are important, its presence is almost fundamental. I don't like to do performances with people sitting watching. That context requires a different attitude, an attitude of an audience watching an actor, a performer performing an action. Instead, I want them to be with me, inside. I hug them, I touch them, sometimes I undress a bit to also assert the politics of the body, not within a non-stereotyped scheme. So it's a claim. Nudity is not exhibitionism, but it is rather an almost political act to say "I am me, I am this".

I am very interested in the discussion on the use of black and white in photography. In particular, in your case, I would like to mention an essay entitled The Splendor of Black by Alain Badiou, where he says this: "Darkness is the place where the act is accomplished, the place where the proximity of this act gives chills to those who cannot see. The light of day, however, forgets what has been done". I connect these visions a bit to the chromaticity of your photos, to the shadows. Why do you use black and white today? What value does it have for you?

I've always used it. I took many color photos, so I started with color. With digital, I totally opted for black and white because color was uncontrollable at the time. In the end, black and white is a radical choice almost to put everything on the same scale, on the same level. Color has always scared me because one wins or dominates over another. The choice is a sort of political statement: everything on the same line. I continue to use it so far, but I do not exclude returning to color in the future.

The exhibition on the 26th at the GAM in Turin, curated by Elena Volpato, addresses the theme of shadows. Volpato mentioned that behind the exhibition there is a work acquired from a previous exhibition, called "Matrix", which represents my stratified city. It is the first time that I exhibit works with layers of photos, and this work has been purchased and put on display. Behind this wall, there is a new work where you can't see anything anymore. The photographs are there, but they are hidden behind a set of images. I want to make the public reflect on what is behind a work. Darkness makes you think, sometimes the shadow says more than the light itself. Also in this case, I adopted a conceptual approach: you don't see an image, but there is a light that illuminates the light. It is a way to pay homage to light, which is fundamental for photography. Without light, there are no photos. I used a construction site spotlight to illuminate the lights that show the photos.

Regarding the series of sculptures and framed photographs, I am very interested in the aspect of image associations. What kind of associations do you make? Is there a sort of association by similarity?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The assembly of images was born from my way of photographing: I used to place the photos on top of each other. One day I decided to do something unusual: cover one photo with another, like a couple, and tie them with a rope. That was the first time I did it. This choice is sometimes dictated by a group of photos or, very often, by chance in exploring the archive. By printing material, producing paintings, and then assembling, or by combining old photos found in the warehouse, changing the frames according to the exhibitions I plan. So it's not a calculated thing. When I try to plan a job, it always ends badly. It's like waking up in the morning and thinking about what to wear: if I reflect too much, I end up making it look ridiculous. For me, the punk attitude is not in clothing or accessories but in being able to do things without thinking too much.

Living like this is what I consider punk. And I behave the same way in art. When I try to plan too much, everything becomes a problem. So I try to keep my work spontaneous and impulsive, fast, even if sometimes I can be wrong. My work should not be perfected or improved. In the past, I tried to make frames with perfect cuts, but now I feel freer. I feel like a photographer but free. And I think that's also why I'm getting a certain consensus in the art world.

I started producing things at 50, and I think if I had been talented from the beginning, maybe I wouldn't have taken the same path. I think sometimes a young person, if talented at the beginning, can burn himself because he is not mature. Not everyone, of course. In my case, I believe that if I had been "talented," I wouldn't have taken this path and I wouldn't have become who I am.

Looking at your journey and looking at the unpredictable. So let's not talk about projects, but about fantasy and imagination. I urge you to think of an almost unattainable dream as what your double would do, if you could have one, living on your skin, however, feeling what he would feel. In this chaotic plan, is there something you haven't done yet and that you would let a double of Jacopo Benassi do?

What could I make him do? I really wouldn't know. Surely I would make him dance. I would like to have a clone who knows how to dance. Maybe today, at this moment, while you're talking to me, something is being born. Why did you give me a way to be inspired? Thank you.