ORLAN

FLEWID VOLUME THREE

Photographer: Angelo Cricchi 
Writer: Raffaella Sciarretta



Nowadays, lots of people need to ride a hyper-sociality, even at the cost of giving up themselves, others prefer to imagine worlds or dimensions that don’t exist than explore reality. You choose a space-shuttle that is your body to ride, imagine, explore dimensions that exceed all types of psychological, social, political, anthropological and philosophical boundaries: what did you find out about yourself and other people?

My body is a place for public debate people on the street recognize me My assistants take care of my social networks I give lectures about my artwork I am sociable and very socialized The artworks that I make a lot in common I question the status of the body in society through all cultural, traditional, religious and political pressures that take their imprints in bodies, particularly in women’s bodies Beauty is only a diktat of the dominant ideology in a precise geography and history.

If female sexuality in a pre-monotheistic paganism, for example, that practiced in the temples of Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, is lived without any moral connotation, with the arrival of monotheists, the female body becomes the object of obsessions, persecutions, renunciations. In addition to religious prescriptions, do you see other factors that have influenced women or prevented them from getting rid of this state of abuse and enslavement?

Education, machismo, sexism, the stereotypes.

Techno-nihilist capitalism seems to have reduced the human to a machine of desire and enjoyment at all costs: what relationship is there between freedom and limits?

I would say that humans reduced to machines. as an artist my freedom exists only if society and the powers that be do not cooperate with religious censorship and do not censor my artworks, allow me to be free and nowadays everything is shut down, on facebook they are looking to pixel out every single breast and close accounts that shows bare bodies.

As they pass through time, the metamorphoses of ORLAN – Orlando already travel into the future. What are ORLAN’s dreams today?

To have microprocessors in my implants to speak all the languages of the countries I go to, and of course that my petition against death would be successful and that we can have the death of death.

ORLAN, I was enchanted by your kind, deep, reserved look when I met you. Is the public ORLAN the same as the private ORLAN? Is there an inaccessible space?

Yes, but for me the I, the identity, are fictions, I think that the body is political and that the private is political. I am compassionate and always rigorous but I am not ‘reserved’ and on the contrary quite funny and exuberant.

What place does love have in your life and how much has it affected your choices?

Probably, even to myself!

One last question about Europe: what are the political and cultural choices that this social experience has yet to think, support and realize?

“We have art lest we perish from the truth” thus spake the philosopher you know.

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