Dino Desica by Simona Aru 2019

I am an Italian visual artist, originally from Naples. I have lived and worked in London for 7 years, Becoming subject to the influences of these cities with it’s own inherent identities and subversive social setups, shaping my perception of identity and sense of belonging.

To navigate the city and the multiple way I am read within it, I have begun adopting a fictional name of Norman Mine. Norman is not a fashionable name these days; as well, not so popular amongst the social ladder British’s hierarchy, because in the past was mainly linked to a working class.

Norman Mine is a platform I use to exercise a process of depersonalization while subtly exposing the seductive relationship of power existing within the structures of the British peerage; where I often found myself dwelling between the ambition of wanting to be recognised and included by it while also wanting to criticise and reject it.

This inextricable and absurd dependency is what motivates my fascination within a certain political, intellectual and social constructed procedures of inclusion and exclusion; of exposure and camouflage, which constantly dominates our sense of persona and belonging. The ones you give yourself, the ones forced onto you.

Norman Mine is a compulsive insight into the absurdity of this thinking methodology. My work today is informed by the necessity of seeking new platforms and stages to transform, dismantle and reconstruct the meaning of my practice. By using my personal experience as a starting point I produce work that is biographical, yet shifts into narratives of fiction and paranoia.

This process requires me to constantly question my sense of stability, belonging and temporality, while producing a body of work that is aesthetically not so different from how 'reality' appears, yet it alters its meaning as much as necessary in order to understand its multiplicity.

By exposing the ‘process of making’ as a backstage experience, I make use of the theatrical arrangements unique to the Neapolitan “messa-in-scena” (staging) where the beauty exists in the ability of aligning contradiction and dissonances onto the same stage.