STREAMS/ GIUSEPPE STAMPONE

In this new addition of Streams, we decided to interview Giuseppe Stampone, an Italian artist, born in Cluses, France, in 1974. Stampone is based between Rome, New York and Brussels.  His artistic production ranges from multimedia installations, videos and drawings made with Bic pen, a technique common to several of his projects. Stampone collaborates with various Universities such as the Accademia di Belle Arti of Urbino where he teaches “Tecniche e Tecnologie delle Arti Visive”, IULM of Milan, the Federico II University of Naples and the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology of Toronto. He elaborates interventions of research and experimentation about art and new media with Alberto Abruzzese and Derrick De Kerckhove. 
Stampone’s work has been exhibited widely throughout Italy and abroad, in international Art Biennial and Museums including the 56th Venice Biennial (2015). (Prometeogallery.com/giuseppe stampone) 
Stampone was the first Italian winner of the residency at Villa Romana in Florence, Tuscany, financed by Deutsche Bank. 

The keywords of this interview were chosen directly by the artist: time, breath and death. 

Time is the obsession of my life. In all my works, there is a desire to expand time, to regain possession of time. Today the global village, the frenetic rhythms, or even the art system require us to do, to produce, to create faster and faster. Within my works, I have decided to recover time. I want to disobey the speed of globalization and the incessant demand of the market. My obsession has existed since I was a child in which the greatest concern was and still is, that time is not endless but finite. 
Breath. When they ask me how do you create a new project? I reply that it is enough to breathe. Breath is the basis of life. Good breathing creates harmony between us and the world. All depends on your respiration. Without oxygen we don’t live, without oxygen, there is no life. Life and death are inextricably linked to the breath. Creation was also related to the breath. 
The third word I have chosen is death.  Time and maturity make you aware of death. A time that inevitably ends, in which we will no longer breathe… Becoming aware of the passage of time, we are forced to estimate all the actions of our life. The artist, in an ecstatic evaluation of things, is the one who grasps certain aspects of reality more easily, because he detaches himself in a certain sense from the “normal” flow of things and reflects on existence. Art, on the other hand, has no death. The artwork does not die, if the artist were to die, his work would resurrect, as it is the only one who is allowed to live for eternity. The true artwork born from the study, dies in the moment of the public exhibition to be reborn after eternal life. Paradoxically the artwork when it dies, in reality, is reborn and needs death to continue living, not only in the collective memory. The black that is compared to death, darkness, emptiness, is a colour that I have adopted in my works. I decided not to use the blue of the Bic pen anymore, but black, due to the particular period of my life I am in. 
I have several artists dear to me. When I create, I imagine having a dialogue with Piero Della Francesca as he contributed to the improvement of perspective, a medium closest to me because it is a tool that allows you to mix more spaces and time in a single vision. The ink of the pen also contains a high percentage of oil and evokes the history of portraiture from a technical and artistic point of view. Piero Della Francesca for what he gave us, I compare it to Malevich who revolutionizes our way of seeing reality. He from the Russian icons comes to Suprematism with his black square. After Malevich, Duchamp arrives with the Ready-Made, which elevates a simple object to an artwork. Here too there is a decontextualized object that dies for its own purpose for which it was built and resurrects for eternity taking on a new value. In my works, for example, the portraits, become emblematic because they escape the rapid mortality produced by the environment from which the images used to compose them were taken; they become works because they rediscover the aspiration to eternity.