@luca_bosani
https://www.lucabosani.com
Can you introduce yourself and your practice?
I am Luca Bosani and I am whatever you think I am.
My practice is an imagination exercise.
It is an expansion towards the unknown, an exploration in documenting and collecting live art and performance, a journey inside the many selves that one self can contain, a collective experience, a hallucination made reality.
Or in other words my full time job as a private investigator at TLSB.
What is the acronym short for?
Tommaso Lungosguardo, Sybil Bender.
The owners of the company.
Can you talk a bit about your creative process and how you begin to develop these performances, works, imaginings?
It’s difficult to answer this question because I am trying to provide others access to parallel realities. When I manage to do so, fiction and reality poetically and indistinguishably merge. So it becomes hard to say if I create something, or if I am simply looking for portals that could lead us somewhere else.
Furthermore, I am often too busy with conundrums to solve, reaching specific locations where unusual things happened, gathering evidence, and completing reports on behalf of TLSB.
So I really don’t know where it all starts,
maybe with a late night call from Sybil?
That’s really interesting, it’s kind of artist as a role within the world rather than being pinned down into a box of what that is, it’s really expansive.
Please let’s not pin down ourselves, never.
I’m trying to offer different points of view towards myself and towards my practice, not anchoring it anywhere. It’s a very dangerous procedure, but so fascinating.
You know, it's more convenient to navigate reality by conforming and blending our multifaceted identities into a single presentation. But what does this univocal projection of ourselves do to our identity and how does this alter our relationships with others?
That really speaks for itself in the sense that you’re almost bringing to light the aspects of reality that are much easier and more comfortable to not necessarily look at all the time, and you are bringing it right to the fore, which is what makes your work so interesting and unique. The works you sent over were The Flying Masnadieri, could you share a bit more about this work and the project?
C0032: The Flying Masnadieri was the first conundrum that I had to officially solve with TLSB. In late 2020, I arrived very close to its solution but never fully solved it.
Here’s an extract from the Official Report on behalf of TLSB:
“Statement of facts:
At dusk on 05/07/2020 in a rural area of the Lombard countryside, two not clearly identifiable figures lifted up from the ground and disappeared into the darkness.
A beam of light that initially surrounded them, took them away. Yet a few moments earlier
they were well anchored to the ground, constrained by earth’s pull.
The photographic documentation of what happened is partial and fragmentary and it is not clear how these figures got to this place, nor how they vanished.”
“Investigative hypothesis:
Closely looking at the available images, the figures seem to be wearing headdresses and shoes inspired by organic forms: the growth structure of the stag’s antlers and the propagation of thunder from the sky to the earth’s surface.
Furthermore, the T-shaped position of the flying figures is reminiscent of scarecrows, as the hat and shirt that they are wearing. Attached to the shirt there are long strips of fabric resembling wings through which I don’t think flight would ever be possible.”
I never solved C0032 completely, but I was able to understand certain key elements of it.
Based on the available evidence I can affirm that
C0032 has a strong connection with identity and masculinity: western looking cowboys hats, football kits, scarecrows. And that it is also filled with a number of ambiguous references including two direct links to the full moon of July: Thunder Moon for the Anglo-saxons and Buck Moon for Native Americans.
For more: www.lucabosani.com/c0032/
I found when looking at them that they resonated with so many different cultures iconography, all sorts of references from across the world, you can see little glimmers of this within the happening.
So how important is sound in the creation of these parallel and metaphysical states, worlds?
Sound brings people together on a visceral, instinctive level. Sound connects and envelopes. Sound is so powerful and offers you direct access to the consciousness, inside something/someone.
My work is an invitation to embark on improbable journeys, fantastic expeditions, multi-sensorial experiences. And sound has a key part in all of them.
Collaborating with talented musicians, I give them total freedom. Their music becomes a journey within the journey. And through their music I lose myself in the environment that I supposedly created alone.
* If you like now you can close your eyes for 10 seconds, and you will notice that your listening skills will be immediately enhanced.
Isn’t it magical? *
Do you draw, how important is drawing and writing within the practice?
I have been drawing since forever really, and I never stopped. Lately I’ve been back at it more regularly and there are quite a lot of works that I haven’t made public yet, while others are still in the making.
Conceptually, painting and drawing on paper is for me a way to preserve the energy of the live events on a more permanent medium. I paint versions of the figures/characters that are part of my live events. The portraits do not aim to be realistic but they are rather caricatures, infinite and alternative versions of the performers and myself.
I paint and draw on a small scale challenging the market driven idea that a big painting is better and more valuable than a small one. I am also challenging the heroic/genius artist's large gestures substituting them with mini gestures and gentle, barely visible marks.
The writing instead has a completely different role in my practice. Writing is like sewing, like if you had a thread in your hand and you were sewing a fabric through, forming a flexible and supportive skeleton.
Writing will generally come before everything, like a foundation for the work, while drawing would come after, as a memory, a remark, an exclamation point.
That’s interesting the idea of the drawing coming at the end, people often think of drawing first, like planning, it makes the process so much more fluid, having these different stages that are not in a set or conventional order.
Fluidity, absolutely.
We are on to the final question, who are some of your favourite contemporary artists at the moment?
Here’s a list in random order that includes some of the artists I’ve been going back to most often and that currently inspire my work:
Monster Chetwynd, Donna Huanca, Matthew Barney, Anne Imhof, Melanie Bonajo, Hugh Hayden, Isaac Lythgoe, Puck Verkade, Rosie Gibbens, Anna Uddemberg, Nora Turato.