Dino Desica by Simona Aru 2019

Norman Mine 

Norman Mine Italian artist

I am an Italian visual artist, originally from Naples, I moved to Rome and then to London where I have been living and working for the past twelve years. The subject of my influences is based on these cities with their own inherent characteristics and subversive social setups which are also the important elements that shape my perception of identity and sense of belonging.

To navigate the city and the multiple ways I am read within it, I have begun adopting a fictional name of Norman Mine. Norman is not a fashionable name in these days; as well, not so popular amongst the social ladder of British’s hierarchy, because in the past it 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 in while also wishing 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 dominate our sense of persona and belonging. 

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 at once biographical and ephemeral, crossing through 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 to understand its multiplicity.

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

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