25 24 I’d like to start this conversation from a black and white photo taken by Tano D'Amico, which portrays you as a hippie: a teenager with a guitar and long, loose hair on her shoulders. What was in a nutshell and how did this little rebellious girl become an artist? There was certainly a search for something unstructured. In my being a hippie, at 17 years old, there was an inner freedom that is probably the only thing I feel connected to my personal art world that I created during this long period. I was always walking around with my guitar then, not just that one time. Singing helped me, as did playing. I was looking for something out of the box, living in a world of my own. I always had a vivid imagination that allowed me to accept reality and made it more and more fascinating. Going back in time, I remember that as a child I used to stand under the living room table, sometimes I would cover it to be isolated, and there I would cut paper, glue it, draw. And then life led me to make other choices for reasons linked to my family of origin, but surely even then there was this need to go beyond. What is the context in which that photograph was taken? It was taken in 1977. I went to demonstrate against the construction of the nuclear power plant in Montalto di Castro. On that occasion, I had taken part with the Living Theatre in a theatrical performance called La Peste. We were supposed to represent the harmful effects of nuclear energy on mankind by comparing it to the plague. Perhaps this was also the reason why Tano D'Amico noticed me! Then, for years, you set aside your artistic side, although you perceived creativity as an existential need... In my opinion, art represents the possibility of immersing myself in my inner journeys, in that magical silence made up of absence of space and time, and then I communicate to the outside world what arise from those journeys. My parents never accepted that I could enrol in art school or in the Accademia di Belle Arti, even though my father claimed that I had a special talent since I was a child: even if I was left alone in an empty room, I could create something. Nevertheless, he wanted me to study biochemistry at the Berkeley University in California to invent the “elixir of life”. A substance that would extend life, his life! I was naive because maybe I should have accepted that proposal and, once there, I could have dedicated myself to art. But I am not like that. In fact, I went to the United States as soon as I graduated from high school, in the summer of 1978, but without any support from my parents. In my innocence, I thought I could go GIUSY LAURIOLA interview by Manuela De Leonardis to an art college where I could paint and dance, another passion of mine, ignoring the fact that it required a lot of money, which I did not have. At the time, I was looking for a way to express myself, but it was very difficult. In the end, by exclusion and not to remain there without studying, I decided to return to Rome and I enrolled in the Faculty of Languages and modern foreign Literatures at La Sapienza University. I have always loved reading. Even novels allowed me to travel with the mind, not only drawing and painting, which I had continued to do on my own, even after graduating with honours. When, soon after, I started working in the field of communication, on the one hand I was very busy with work, on the other hand having a salary allowed me to study art with private teachers and attend afternoon courses at the school of Arts and Crafts of San Giacomo in Rome. I was fascinated by the smells of painting! The scent of turpentine, the scent of solvents... I could finally start to really dedicate myself to painting. You tell us something about your trip to the United States in the booklet–catalogue accompanying the exhibition Cambialamore, held in 2004 at the Salon Privé Arti Visive in Rome... I had identified California as a place of freedom where everything was possible, but when I got there, I discovered that things were very different. Maybe I should have gone to New York, not Santa Cruz where it was all “let’s have party”. It wasn't what I was really looking for, although I had a lot of fun! Yes, I talked about this experience in the booklet for Cambialamore, my first major exhibition organised by Sergio Rispoli. I made an installation that was a 30 metre strip, 80 centimetres high, with photos taken from magazines and the web, manipulated and reassembled in a sarcastic and provocative way. They were mainly images of pain contaminated by others that, instead, reflected a society that does not suffer, presented to the indifference of a gaze that has learned to ignore the sense of tragedy. Shortly before, there had been the attack on the twin towers on 11 September 2001 and then the war in Iraq. I also reconnected with my personal experience, making an excursus that started from the contradiction between the imagination I had fed for California, listening to the music of Bob Dylan or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the reality that had failed to fill my inner restlessness. Artistically, the linear photographic narrative of this project, which was a description of what I was seeing, is parallel to the written one. It is an alternative
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