Interview with Killnoir, 2003

1) Your pictures often show the body being wounded, bound and abandoned, so that it is normal to feel curiosity about the action and the kind of process which has determined the final result of the shot. Would you like to explain how your images are born, how they develop and finally die? Do the body and the soul need wounds in order to communicate?

There is never a “key” to read what I do. My photographs are born or disclose myself only in the specific instant in which they are shot. No illusions, nor tricks. In the pictures I am simply the archetype of myself. There isn’t a sound, a word, a colour. Nothing can portray pain, apart from the abandonment into nothingness. This very nothingness is for me a goal, empty and free from prejudices. It is the instant!

Suffering you end up doing things that you are unable to realize. It is like setting fire to sheets of paper, then leaving ashes of what we want to forget or cancel. It is the deaf proof of a “non-being”, or of a “whishing to never have been”.

Photography is a private documentation, a proof that I have wished to give myself. The shot is mute, the colours are suffocating. Then there is fear, plenty of fear. To make publicly available my pictures has turned me into a prostitute. I have been raped each and every time an eye (for discreet it might have been) has posed a glance over me.

2) Your photographs seem to be born out of the dark, being modelled entirely by the shadows. It has been said that sculpting is nothing but removing from the raw materials all that is superfluous...then what is left of Killnoir in the final print of a photograph, after the above process has taken place? Nothing of me is left.

In my photographs I do not exist. There are only pieces of a figure. Fragments of a person. Photography allows me to offer myself without any identification of sort.

There are moments in which I see my own mutilated body and it is just me killing the flesh. My own killer, a homicide taking place in a blind room. I am eaten by the darkness that confuses and cancels everything and in that darkness only traces of a negated existence are left.

3) Which kind of relationship do you tend to develop with the art you enter in contact with? Cinema, painting, literature, music...is there some sort of a common lineage which binds all these forms of expression to your own personal taste, regardless of the medium?

When I am photographing there is always a soundtrack which accompanies my visions. Everything is purely occasional, emotional. I don’t find inspiration in anything or anybody else, as my way of expressing myself is highly personal. There is no art, drawing, music which are capable of representing me – and even more – represent my rooms and the trajectory of my own life.

It is then, just after I have given birth to an image that I realise that I am part of a system on which I am dependent! I am part of a chain-reaction, I am part of this mechanism which at all costs asks for something. So I offer this “art” (?), my art if so it can be called...or even better my martyrdom; then if others wish to look at it, that’s ok, as we are all spectators of something. I myself admire things such as a dead doll, the nakedness of a model, or the rage of an artist, and so on...

Religion itself makes us part of a spectacle of death. A crucifixion. Blood and pain.

It is a theatre of violence. Life teaches us to die.

4) Your images are always impregnated by both an affirmation and a negation of the self. In the moment of shooting, do you already know what to do (having a plan of sort in your mind) or do you simply follow the instinct and the emotions of the moment? Brain or belly?

Heart.

Although nowadays we should feel ashamed in talking about “feelings”.
The L of “Love” is bound to the T of “Terror”, and in me the two things are melted the one into the other in that “Click”.

5) Could we say that you recreate a sort of performance without an audience, in the stage which proceeds the moment of taking a picture, a performance involving blood, use and/or abuse of objects, the appropriation of a space on your behalf, psychodramas? How do you see the so-called body-art evolving, in between machine and body, a “clinical” imagery and bodily fluid? Can you still find a degree of urgency, a need for expression in there, or do you just see it becoming a trend like many others?

I do not know what passes in other people’s minds. Everybody seem to want to express something and themselves. Many want to scream something, demonstrate and show. Personally, I haven’t got much to offer. I enter and exit the scene alone with myself. There is me and the camera: it is a sort of a “one-way communication”. I am capable of transforming myself in 5 minutes!

My aim is to get to the image. I have a vision, a mixture of sensations in my head. So when thought and reality come to be the same thing…I freeze the instant, deflagrating the film.

I have a morbid type of relationship with the objects. I love everything which is able to stimulate my visual and sensorial enjoyment. It is like if I was keeping on having sex with photography. It is an infinite erotic fulfilment taking place due to all that I choose: lights, sounds, interior designs, etc.

SEX AND DEATH SEX AND DEATH SEX AND DEATH.

6) Therapy... are there any instantaneous connections which spring to your mind in hearing this word being pronounced?

Maybe.

It is a way like many other to pull the plug. A dissociation from the ugly everyday reality. This ugly monster of a life which seduces me and nothing ever forgives. Photography has helped me overcoming certain stages, keeping me in a balance between suffering and liberation. Photography is a secret friend, who knows everything about myself.

7) Why did you start taking pictures? Which camera did you use? What do you think of the use of digital, both in the moment of shooting the picture and in terms of further interventions on it? Does the “truthfulness” of a picture means something to you?

This is a technical question and I do not exactly know where to start in order to answer it. There is not a starting point...there is only a peculiar moment in my own life in which I feel useless.

There is a day in which I hate myself and I want to harm myself.

Another which makes a limitless passion burst inside me, a passion which wishes to become frozen inside me.

And thousand other days in which I just wish to pleasure myself with my own illusions, with my desires and innuendoes.

The pretence of the photograph allows me to enact a distortion, not to fake or hide something but only to ruin a part of me and to see clearly inside of me what is it that isn’t working.

All my photographs are both true and false at the same time. There cannot be any kind of revelation in any artistic (or photographic) work. Nobody can see the future neither can be aware of what is taking place in another person’s mind while he/she is creating something.

Everybody’s judgement is always precarious. I am myself “precarious” right here.

8) I know that you are very much interested in cinema. Which directors do you admire the most, particularly from the point of view their photography?

As far as the foreign scene goes, I definitely adore Radley Metzger’s movies! He has been able to capture so well the spirit of thirty years ago, the most sensual, morbid, hallucinogenic atmospheres. His screenplays always include a magnificent use of lighting, and each detail – even material ones – seems to explode in poetry! A hundred pages would never be enough for me to fully explore the topic of Italian cinema, but for sure the director who I feel particularly bound to (and somehow “in synch with”) is Michelangelo Antonioni. I was deeply touched by a phrase of his which I have found while reading a monograph dedicated to him: “The colour best suited to a magnificent body is not the green of the fields, nor the blue of the lakes, but the black of a photography-studio”.

Antonioni’s minimalism is deafening, he has been capable of capturing the world in monochromatic films and in between cold architectures and few diaphanous words. I also admire a lot Truffaut’s work but I have to confess that my strongest feelings have come from some of the B-movies from the end of the seventies. In these I always rediscover some sensations capable of bringing me back to my childhood years, thanks to their colours, their interior designs, their lingerie, their shapes. Images are essential to me. I feed on visions. To look is like filtering life through other people’s stories, always having it imposed upon us indirectly, waiting to see what you really want to see.

Motives…illusions…dreams…

9) Nowadays we are submerged by images and information much more than in the past. I think images and in general the imagery are becoming globalised too, so that certain imposed models (say, Hollywood, or European fashion) are already becoming common to people in Italy like they are to those in South-Korea. How can we nowadays define what an image of a certain artistic quality is? Is there some space left for quality at all?

And what would this very quality that you talk about be? Personally I give importance to very few things, and among these there are some totally useless ones. I can’t answer this question of yours as I feel really distant from the problem of globalisation. Maybe I am myself floating inside it even more than many other people, but sincerely –and egoistically – I try to survive this horror with my own imaginary.

I hardly let myself be influenced by the mass-media. My own judgement kills more than a blade and most of the time I point this blade exclusively against myself.

10) I have ordered alphabetically all the files of your photographs which you have sent me; it strikes me that the most common, recurring, words are “Death” and “Suicide”. Is this just a matter of simplicity and due to your lack of interest in creating associations between your images and a name, or is there a deeper, more complex, reason to it?

There is a lot of laziness and most of all a total lack of sense!

I hate titles. I cannot stand determinations of any kind. When I am watching a painting in a museum I never look at the title. I don’t know…

I seem unable to concentrate in a few words all the meaning of a whole emotive process..it is all more, much more!

Sometimes I have called my photographs things like: 249ì'2ogjfibnire y83 or .vì0340unadf0i...does that seem logic to you?

That’s also why, in sending emails, I always leave the “Object” line blank.

11) Between trash, splatter, a medical imagery and the avant-garde…what does the word and the image of “Blood” evoke in your mind?

Suffering.

The suffering of the soul. The martyrdom of a body.

Blood is the cry of the flesh. A violent scream which explodes in crimson red.

12) Barthes said that in love, the deepest wounds are caused by what we see rather than by what we actually do. What is love then? Image? Not seeing? Or seeing far too much?

It is both things at the same time.

Love is madness! The loss of reason but also giving oneself completely, not asking necessarily for anything in return.

To love is to adore.

The object of my love automatically become something divine. That thing that is able to dry me, to suck my soul, my own body, my own mind…but that is also blinding me and killing me at the same time.

For me to love means to go mad, to make the heart sick together with the brain, to reach a stage of total disequilibrium; I admit that even just the image of love is essential to me.

The pleasure to look…LOVE!...which in the end doesn’t exist.

13) What is it that you haven’t been able to express in your work yet (and that we should be looking forward for the future)?

NOTHINGNESS.

My next photograph will be a sheet of grey paper.

14)One of the most obvious and striking elements in your pictures is that you are, in 99% of them, an active part of the image, and the object of the picture too. Is this because you are not interested in what happens outside of your own world, or is it because you feel the need to question yourself deeply as a mean to understand your whole existence?

To me, my photographs mean what an autobiography means to his writer.

How could I ever represent myself outside of these walls, and inside another body?

Killnoir doesn’t exist if not here.

Interview by Yuri D (durruti@interfree.it).

No parts of this interview can be reproduced without Channel83’s written permission.

You can contact Killnoir at:
killnoir@libero.it