Mario Sughi from Dublin (Ireland)
Your new daily ritual ...
I live and work in Dublin. Here the restrictions are not (or at least until now they haven't been) as binding as elsewhere. In the late afternoon I go out for long walks. The police don't stop you, the important thing is to keep a little distance from each other. At least two meters is written on the various luminous signs that meet along the road. The couples, however, all walk embraced, even tighter than usual as if their embrace meant to the whole world “we are couples, our love is greater than any restriction ". I am happy for them! But my thoughts go to the people who, instead, they are alone!
Then, meetings of families who are also beautiful close around their children. Looking at them you would say they are serene, quiet if it weren't that they suddenly jump off the other side of the sidewalks when you pass them by. Sometimes we don't even exchange a smile anymore, a gesture of apology (because of that abrupt maneuver), as if this our new behavior (this dodging each other at first sight) had become the most normal thing, instinctive of the world!
It, then, there are those with masks and masks, sometimes full face masks. colors, blu, viola, sometimes white, sometimes all black! As I walk for a moment I forget about the virus and I enjoy imagining what would happen now if this procession of masks met on the road a group of young girls who, because they are Muslims, wear the veil!?! They would drop the insults for once!? Or they would scream as they always have: “Ah what a horror to cover your face! With us this will never happen!“And how would the girls respond to these masked men!?! These thoughts cross my mind every now and then when I walk the surreal streets, beautiful and, at the same time, sad, almost always with few people e, mostly, with so few machines.
Most people are at home and I see them all in the evening on social media, in some of their new home videos. And I wonder, in front of this new explosion of DIY videos of people talking to the whole world (or maybe just to themselves) through the camera of a smartphone, what if we all became miniatures of Orwell's Big Brother in 1984? We do nothing but spy on each other and let us spy on each other inside our homes, badly lit and made of transparent walls. And if everything were only and more trivially a great self-portrait of our society: more and more like an orgy of small amateur porn made with no more confidentiality, privacy or censorship?! Here it is, this is the new daily ritual in which I mirror myself and to which I also turn in a complicated sea of always unspeakable contradictions!
Museums and galleries have reacted to the moment with digitalization and virtuality. What are your "strategies" for establishing new relationships?
In addition to working with traditional techniques and with art galleries, I am also an illustrator mostly for publishing houses and magazines, and I produce my works by drawing directly on the computer. And I must say that drawing and painting on the computer has become for me a medium like any other with its advantages and disadvantages. For example, there are advantages at the level of work distribution.
In the days of the "virus", for example, ho I collaborate with Olvidados, a young artistic collective from Cesena and Forlì. As it happens more and more often, we had never met in person. They contacted me via email a few weeks ago and asked me for drawings to accompany their blog that they weave together with their readers at the time of the quarantine. The blog is titled "A bit of Love a bit of Freedom" they provide the texts, I, from Dublin, I submit my works: my digital illustrations. It, then, the same (I mean everything by email, wetransfer, dropbox etc…) it happened with Magazine "A", historical magazine of anarchists and the world of Italian publishing, so I have just created the cover design for the May issue and accompanied with my illustrations a dossier of theirs concerning our society at the time of the "virus".
Even if they are now, and we are, get used to working remotely, the moment I click on the "Send" button of the email still has a certain effect on me: my job, to which I have dedicated days and days, in a second he enters an editorial office in Milan, Cesena, ecc… Just like it is here in front of me!
We are realizing that we can live with less mobility?
Maybe and unfortunately… yes! Before being citizens, we are human beings. And man was born and made to move completely freely, it lies in its very essential condition of existing. If you confine it to a place, you force it like a goldfish in the tub, a nightingale in a cage, a beautiful flower in a vase! For the last fifty years, green spaces in our cities have decreased visibly. The streets have become only for cars. Popular palaces have smaller and smaller windows, increasingly narrow balconies and to be kept almost closed 24 hours on 24 because the air, out, it is unbreathable and the noise of the streets deafening. Now that this freedom of movement is restricted even further, the digital world, at first, it becomes a kind of refuge (a little relief), but then it risks becoming the new reality that replaces the natural one. But a world in which we can act without having to move can never be our natural habitat! Certainly not an ideal habitat to fully express what we entirely are!
Mario Sughi aka nerosunero was born in Cesena in 1961. Son of Alberto Sughi, it is in his studio under his guidance that Mario began to paint and draw. Towards the end of the seventies in Rome he published his first drawings and illustrations for Il Male and Zut, two popular satirical magazines of the time. In 1986 he graduated from La Sapienza University in Rome with a degree in Art and History. Three years later he moved to Dublin where in 1995 completes a doctorate in medieval history from Trinity College. In 1996 at Queen's University, Belfast, prepares an edition of a medieval Latin text for the Irish Manuscripts. On his return to Dublin he returns to his original occupation, working as an illustrator for an archaeologists' signature. It was during this time that he began to use digital techniques for his drawing. In 2007 leaves the company of archaeologists to devote himself to the work of full-time illustrator and artist. That year his first collective exhibition was held in Dublin at the Loft Gallery in Lombard Street, followed by his first personal exhibitions, at the Green Room in Manchester in 2010, and then at the Exchange Gallery in Temple Bar first and then The Complex Studios in Smithfield Square, in Dublin in 2011. As Thomas Evangelista writes in a recent catalog, published by Vanillaedizioni, the artist “lhe works on the re-elaboration of daily practice through an ambiguous contemplation of the body and places. As a modern traveler he observes reality with a mixed attitude of detachment and participation, a virtual "man of the crowd", invisible yet subtly present in grasping, in the vagueness of the usual, a track (theatrical) of desire and libido”. www.nerosunero.org