10 Questions with Enrico Muratore Aprosio
EMA is an Italian artist and a peace and human rights activist, based in Geneva since 2016. Born in Sanremo in 1972, at the age of 19, EMA moved to France to study law and human rights. During his university years in Nice and in Strasbourg, EMA also worked as a musical radio producer, journalist, and event organizer specialized in Jamaican music. He was also active as a self-taught artist, producing hundreds of collages, paintings, cartoons, and as a writer (short stories, poems, and songs) and live performer with various bands.
After completing his studies in France and his military service in Italy, in 1998 EMA joined the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Angola as Human Rights Officer, and since then, he became a human rights, humanitarian and development worker, living and travelling across the globe, especially in Africa, for the last 30 years. EMA served the UN in various roles related to the promotion and protection of human rights, humanitarian affairs, democratic governance and inclusive societies, the protection of minorities and the elimination of gender, social, economic, and other forms of inequality and discrimination. He also worked for international NGOs such as Oxfam in West Africa and Lawyers without Borders in Rwanda.
EMA also dedicated a good part of his life to pro-bono activities in the field of peace education (see Enrico Muratore: une vie à la quête de la Paix et de la Justice), including as the founder and Secretary-General of the Association of Captain Mbaye Diagne for the Culture of Peace. Promoting the legacy of the heroic Senegalese peacekeeper who gave his life after rescuing, unarmed, over 1.000 people in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis, the Association was instrumental in fostering the UN Security Council’s recognition of the Captain’s bravery and the institution of the Captain Mbaye Diagne Medal for Exceptional Courage.
Enrico Muratore Aprosio - Portrait
Meanwhile, EMA continued his activities as a journalist and civic activist. Among other, he led UN humanitarian journalism projects in Angola and in Kenya; produced numerous documentary films and media campaigns, collaborating en passant with Nobel Prize laureates Dario Fo and Wangari Maathai, and personalities like the writer Boubacar Boris Diop, General Romeo Dallaire, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the UN Special Envoy on Genocide Adama Dieng, and many others. EMA also published numerous articles on human rights, conflict, humanitarian affairs, development and international relations on the important Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano and other online media.
In 2016 EMA settled in Geneva with his two daughters. There, he developed his pro-bono activities for the promotion of the culture of peace by organizing, among others, conferences at the Palais des Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters. At the same time, EMA focused his professional activities with the UN on the promotion of economic, social, and cultural rights, particularly the human rights to water and sanitation, the right to food, right to education, as well as on the protection of cultural rights and of the cultural heritage.
In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, and restrictions to the movement were imposed, EMA decided to use the extra time to restart doing collages, writing stories and poems, and painting. His 2020-2022 works address themes such as mental disease, exploitation, capitalism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, propaganda, imperialism, colonialism, racism, slavery, corruption, inequality, discrimination, gender, love, marriage, divorce, child miseducation, revolt, and revolution.
Neutral Cows, acrylic and markers on canvas, 2022 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
From June to November 2022, EMA showcased 45 of these works in three Lucid Dreaming Shows in Geneva, Montecarlo, and Zug, and presented selected works at prestigious events such as the European Hotel Awards at Hotel Fairmont Geneva and the Turin Pen Show.
In the same period, following Russia’s military aggression of Ukraine, EMA conceived and undertook to develop his new art project, inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and focused on the war in Ukraine and the risks of nuclear disaster: The Radioactive Beasts.
Since humans became mad, the animals of the farm send silent messages asking them to take seriously the threat this conflict entails for all forms of life on earth. In dangerously polarized times, the Radioactive Beasts are telling humans to restart talking about ways to build peace.
From 21 to 27 April 2023, EMA will exhibit six of his Radioactive Beasts artworks in New York, on a giant billboard in Times Square, as part of ‘Exploring the World’, a collective art show organized by the East Village Art Collection - EVAC Gallery.
Suicidal Sheep, acrylic and markers on canvas, 2023 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
“I paint to send out an SOS: our world is in danger.”
INTERVIEW
First of all, tell our readers a little bit about you. Who are you, and how did you start experimenting with images?
I am an Italian artist and human rights and peace professional, and activist based in Geneva since 2016, after many years of work for the UN and other organizations, especially in Africa.
I was born in Sanremo, in Liguria, in 1972, and until the age of 18, I grew up in Grimaldi di Ventimiglia, a beautiful sunny village overlooking the Mediterranean sea, less than a kilometer away from the Italian-French border, and 15 kms away from the lights of the Principality of Monaco.
My father, Italo, is an architect engaged in the protection of the transborder territory, and my mother, Liliana, is a painter, history of art and literature passionate, flower producer and gardener. My brother Alberto became a lawyer.
Since I was very young, like most children, and through my teenage years, I liked to draw and paint; and until my university years in Nice and Strasbourg, I continued to produce hundreds of collages, paintings, drawings, caricatures and comics, and also wrote numerous poems, short stories, and songs. I was also very active as a reggae and African music journalist, working for various radio stations, writing for specialized magazines, organizing concerts and events, and singing in various bands.
In 1997-98 I left Strasbourg to do my compulsory military service in Italy. I was first sent all the way down to the south, in a socially depressed and polluted area, but not far from Naples and some other super interesting and spectacular spots like Paestum, Pompei, and the Amalfi Coast.
Most soldiers in the barracks were 18 or 19, but I was 25, and I had a law degree, so they immediately put me to work in an office. A lieutenant saw me drawing in that office, and he asked me to paint military emblems on wooden shields for military parades (I just suppose, because I never saw what they did with my shields), he gave me the paint and everything I needed, and put me in a warehouse full of mattresses, which was fortunate because the corporals in the barracks did their best not to let us sleep at night.
This also enabled me to spend a more pleasant and relaxing service, spending my time drawing and painting in the company of two other military artists (a master of fine arts from Latium and a Milanese graffiti artist) that I had met there and co-opted. This situation went on for almost two months, until I was sent back to the North, to other barracks in my sweet Liguria, and my experience as a military artist ended there.
The next year, as soon as I was out of the Army, I was hired as Human Rights Officer by the UN peacekeeping mission in Angola, and since then, I have put my artistic practice aside, to focus on my human rights, humanitarian and development work, a field where I am still active today.
Ascending Pigs, oil on canvas, 2022 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
You went back to art during the Covid-19 pandemic. What inspired you to make such a move? And did your art practice help you cope with the global situation we lived in?
Yes, certainly, creating art and writing was my way to cope with the situation and live better than I would have lived without art in those unprecedented times – and now.
Actually, back in April 2020, after a chat with my old friend Adriano, I wrote a short story called A Tale of Time and Love, a dialogue between two friends who have different opinions about who is the main victim of the pandemic, those for whom we should feel especially sorry: the young, who cannot enjoy the best time of their life, or the old, whose time is running out, and every minute weights like gold. And the two friends, who are between ages, and carry their load of experiences, life and love stories, successes and failures, adventures and disappointments, and hopes, find that this time is actually the time they were waiting for to pause and rediscover themselves, at last!
So, when the pandemic erupted, like everyone else, I was confined home, and this opportunity of taking time for myself, along with the situation that had developed in the world, inspired me to occupy my free time to do something meaningful, and express my inner self freely.
I restarted my reverse collages, that I call like this because superposing or juxtaposing layers do not make them of paper, but I first design a frame on paper, and then cut it and place progressive layers of images underneath, to produce an impression of gothic cathedral glass windows and intricated patterns, with almost hidden details, that are crucially important.
With this technique I created the CORONAVIRUS SERIES, composed of 12 original artworks that deal with the pandemic, but also with the other epidemics of various mental diseases built on violence, exploitation, abuse, corruption, discrimination, relational problems and childhood experiences, that, in my view, have contaminated our world from well before Covid-19 began, generating collective disorder, conflict, and trauma, and further mental suffering, without any cure in sight.
This madness epidemic obviously continues in the even crazier world of today, where, as soon as they lifted Covid-19 restrictions, the world’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and their servile media kicked off the general rehearsal for WWIII in Ukraine; while we, ordinary citizens, observe the escalation, confused, and worried, feeling disempowered, and trying to just mind our lives and think not too much of the big dark clouds that are developing over our common future.
The same theme is declined in other ways in successive paintings, especially those in my LUCID DREAMING SERIES, which investigate the subconscious, sleep phases and lucid dreaming phenomena, and mental therapy, or in the FALLING ANGELS SERIES with works such as ‘In the Depth of Madness’ or ‘Whosoever Diggeth A Pit, Shall fall In It’.
In the Depth of Madness (2022) © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
Most of my paintings are oil paintings, but I also created a couple of more philosophical art series, using mixed techniques and materials. For instance, the ALPHABET SERIES, contains paintings that are drawn using words, sentences, lyrics and poems, or even entire excerpts in ancient Greek from Plato’s ‘Apology of Socrates’ or ‘The Republic’ to produce portraits respectively of Socrates and Plato, or the portrait of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I have drawn with the text of the speech on war and racism the Emperor of Ethiopia pronounced before the UN General Assembly in 1963, which in 1975 became the text of the famous Bob Marley’s song ‘War’.
Finally, the DAWN OF MANKIND SERIES looks into the roots of all of us humans and dreams about prehistoric societies in Europe. It reinterprets, through a psychedelic lens, paleolithic and neolithic art and burial rituals, displaying the high levels of women’s power in those matriarchal societies predating agriculture, in works like ‘Matriarchy’ or ‘Das Mutterrecht’, using a mix of watercolor pencils, ink and oil on paper.
My interest in these societies comes from the fact that in my village, Grimaldi, in the XIX century, the Prince of Monaco and French and Italian archeologists discovered and unburied the remains of fourteen individuals from the Upper Paleolithic, men, women, and children considered to originally have come from Eastern Africa. The Senegalese anthropologist and historian Cheikh Anta Diop call them the Grimaldi men in his famous ‘Black Nations and Cultures’. These individuals were found in the Balzi Rossi site along with fifteen stone statuettes of these so-called Venus figurines who inspired my paintings.
On a different note, you have a long career as a human rights activist, and you have worked internationally on several missions and International projects. Does this influence your art?
Definitely. I worked in countries like Angola, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Nigeria, Kenya, and very recently, the Central African Republic, and other countries that experienced war, genocide, went through colonialism, slavery, exploitation, and continue to experience poverty and abuse, from Niger to India to East Timor. I also worked on human rights in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine well before the present war.
Of course, I learnt a lot from all these experiences, and what I learnt is reflected in my art and strengthens my convictions. Coming from my small village on the Italian-French border, I learned about the beauty and diversity of the rest of the world, about other ways of life, and felt all those smells, and colors, and vibes, and saw so much life and heard so many stories from so many interesting and unique people I met.
But I also saw first-hand the excruciating impacts of war, violence, and misery on entire populations. I saw the results of greed for money and power and hate speech combined. I visited the desolate refugee settlements of South Sudanese in Northern Uganda; I met in Goma with Congolese women and even children who had been gang raped by militias. It was so hard to hear their stories.
In the genocide memorial of Murambi, a technical school where in 1994, some 50.000 Tutsis were slaughtered in 4 days, I met with Emmanuel Murangira, the custodian of the site, one of the four only survivors of that massacre. Emmanuel's forefront still carries the sunken, deep trace of a bullet that failed to leave him dead. He brought me in front of piles over piles of calcinated bodies of black people who now turned white like chalk, and pointing out to a specific heap of bones and mommies among them, he told me: 'This is my family, my wife and children', and asked me to take pictures. So, I took them, but after developing them, the vibe they emanated was so evil that I just abandoned them in a drawing in my former office in Kigali the day I left Rwanda.
I also learnt, luckily, about people who were ready to give their life to save others, like Captain Mbaye Diagne of Senegal, a UN military observer who was killed in Kigali on 31 May 1994 after rescuing, alone and unarmed, over 1.000 people, or Pierantonio Costa, the former Honorary Consul of Italy in Rwanda who managed to save some 2.000 people from hell.
On 7 April 2009, I was in Milan precisely with Pierantonio, as well as with the Rwandan genocide survivor and writer Yolande Mukagasana. I called Dario Fo, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and proposed to pay him a visit to their company. He invited us all over to his house, we drank tea, talked and took pictures. The next day Dario Fo called me to offer us two of his own original paintings, allusive to the Palestinian people and their plight. I like to remember all these deeply good and generous people like Pierantonio Costa and Dario Fo.
In Senegal, where I lived with my family for seven years, aside from my professional activities with the UN, I served as the pro-bono Secretary-General of the Association of Captain Mbaye Diagne for the Culture of Peace, and in that period I organized numerous activities and events to promote the cultural heritage of Captain Mbaye Diagne, supported the production of films, wall-paintings, and comics about the Captain.
Commemoration of Captain Mbaye Diagne in Dakar, Regional Office for West Africa of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2015 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
UN peacekeepers day dedicated to Captain Mbaye Diagne, Geneva 2017 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
But from the very beginning, working for the UN gave me the opportunity to do fantastic things and projects, for all these years until now, and although I was not always active as an artist myself, I still had the opportunity to be engaged in the artistic and cultural world of the countries where I lived and worked.
Angola was my first assignment with the UN, back in 1998, and for the first three years (of the seven I spent there), I worked on human rights education and media, collaborating with local artists, musicians, poets, writers, poets, theatre trainers, actors, and visual artists of all kinds, as well as journalists, media and all the most creative people in the country. The security context in Angola was hard, but I loved the work.
I organized two national human rights song contests: the first was in 1998-99, and was meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: a human rights music contest in the middle of the war, with human rights songs played by all radios.
Carnival on the Marginal of Luanda, Angola, 1999 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
I was 26, and I didn't have the smallest idea of what I was putting myself into, but in the end, everything went well, and we organized a beautiful final show in one of the biggest theatres in Luanda. Not only we had the contestants sing their human rights songs but also had excellent theatrical performances on the theme of freedom of expression of artists, dances and live painting, and for me, it was a wonderful experience.
In 2000-2001 I led the organization of another human rights campaign in Angola. We called it 'Get Up Stand Up', and to begin, we printed 7.000 black and white and red gold and green t-shirts with Bob Marley's face and the words 'Get Up Stand Up for Your Rights' in Portuguese, that we distributed to all the street people, children in the streets, and amputees in Luanda. As a result, they were visible everywhere. And people liked them.
Angolan street children in a shelter, Luanda, 2001 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
With the Catholic Church's Radio Ecclesia, we set up a radio program also called 'Get Up Stand Up'. The programme reported live from very complicated field situations giving the floor to victims of human rights violations and became very famous. Also, we trained ten theater groups and sent them out throughout Luanda and other cities of Angola to perform, over a few months, hundreds of human rights theater plays in the street, in markets, public places, and even in police stations. And at the same time, we organized a second war-time human rights music contest, which surpassed the success of the first one.
As the war in Angola ended in 2002, the peace mission also ended, and after leaving Angola for the first time in 2003, from 2006 to 2008, I returned there to head the UN humanitarian information office. I was managing a large team of journalists, radio producers, stringers from the field, writers, and actors, we were doing humanitarian radio reporting from the field, and we also produced a very successful educational, humanitarian radio drama called Camatondo broadcast by the National Radio of Angola, which literally everyone loved in the country.
Up to now, I maintain my links with Angola, first of all, because my daughters, Alexandra and Letizia, are half-Angolan (we also have a Senegalese dog called Stella), but also because I kept in touch with many of my Angolan friends, especially musicians like the great Paulo Flores and the New York-based opera singer Nelson Ebo, who came together to produce a song at my request (see Paulo Flores e Nelson Ebo sing "Monami). The song was presented at the United Nations Human Rights Council intersessional workshop on cultural rights and the protection of cultural heritage, which I organized in 2021 in Geneva for the UN Human Rights Office, and where I also invited to perform the Jamaican dub poet Ras Takura.
What is your personal aim as an artist?
I am a father (and an uncle), and I am a painter. This would be enough to care about the future and to also feel the need to leave some heritage beyond my lifetime. But what heritage can be transmitted to whom, in times of nuclear threats looming over the future of mankind?
So, I paint to send out an SOS.
The risk that things will end up very badly for all of us is not a dystopian fantasy, given what's happening in Ukraine and the implications for the rest of the world.
So, my art is militant art, and I don't want to sleep and try to wake up the day that we're all already dead. My goal is to contribute to promoting a collective, transnational reaction to the suicidal policies of the leaders of today. We better get up and stand up once again, do something to have a say on what is going on, and contribute to waking up others.
Art can be a good strategy to convey important messages to large audiences. And I don't see many more important things than de-escalating the risk of a third world war and a final nuclear confrontation.
This is what the involvement of all the parties in the Ukraine conflict seems to threaten, and we have absolutely no guarantee that these crazy people who are gambling with our lives will never press the red button, in case things don't go the way they want. Media have been saying that Putin is crazy like Hitler. Well, so how do we cope with the fact that a crazy man controls thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons? We should not underestimate the threat and start putting some water, rather than oil, on the burning fire.
I would ask all world leaders, from all countries involved, not to play the Russian roulette with our heads. If anything goes wrong, if too much vodka or whiskey is drunk by the wrong persons, human mistakes are also possible, by both sides. We also don't want anyone anymore fighting around nuclear plants. Sting used to sing, I hope the Russians love their children too. I hope so too, and I also hope that the Americans and the Europeans do the same because sometimes it's not so clear.
Matriarchy, oil on canvas, 2021 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
Let There be Donkey, acrylic markers on canvas, 2022 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
The solution? I don't have any solution, but I think they all need to start talking and find some negotiated way out. And we, ordinary citizens, and especially artists, need to urge them to do so, and we need to build true democracy and reject militarist propaganda.
This is the SOS that the Radioactive Beasts, my new art project that I am taking out to the world in 2023, intend to send out to the world.Most of my paintings are oil paintings, but I also created a couple of more philosophical art series using mixed techniques and materials. For instance, the ALPHABET SERIES, contains paintings that are drawn using words, sentences, lyrics, and poems, or even entire excerpts in ancient Greek from Plato’s ‘Apology of Socrates’ or ‘The Republic’ to produce portraits respectively of Socrates and Plato, or the portrait of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I have drawn with the text of the speech on war and racism the Emperor of Ethiopia pronounced before the UN General Assembly in 1963, which in 1975 became the text of the famous Bob Marley’s song ‘War’.
Finally, the DAWN OF MANKIND SERIES looks into the roots of all of us humans and dreams about prehistoric societies in Europe. It reinterprets, through a psychedelic lens, paleolithic and neolithic art and burial rituals, displaying the high levels of women’s power in those matriarchal societies predating agriculture, in works like ‘Matriarchy’ or ‘Das Mutterrecht’, using a mix of watercolor pencils, ink and oil on paper.
My interest in these societies comes from the fact that in my village, Grimaldi, in the XIX century, the Prince of Monaco and French and Italian archeologists discovered and unburied the remains of fourteen individuals from the Upper Paleolithic, men, women and children considered to originally have come from Eastern Africa. The Senegalese anthropologist and historian Cheikh Anta Diop call them the Grimaldi men in his famous ‘Black Nations and Cultures’. These individuals were found in the Balzi Rossi site along with fifteen stone statuettes of these so-called Venus figurines who inspired my paintings.
Can you tell us about the process of creating your work? What aspect of your work do you pay particular attention to?
I find my inspiration waking up very early in the morning. The early hours are silent, and even if I live in a city like Geneva, there is a beautiful garden in front of my building with beautiful trees, and I can hear the early birds’ concerts. It’s very relaxing.
I have a lot of ideas while drinking my first coffee cup. Images and messages come all the time to my mind, and I just have to transfer them on the canvas or on a paper sheet.
I like to mix figurative and abstract, create psychedelic environments, play with the surreal and the suggestive; enter into details; frame and reorder the disorder, give each piece of the puzzle its place, recompose the chaos through movement, take back all the monsters I can into Pandora’s box, and heal the pain through color.
Mind Reshuffling (2021) © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
The drawing and composition process is the most painful; I have to pay a lot of attention to what I do. I need silence. The painting process, instead, is long but very relaxing. On average, I can work between 80 and 250 hours on a canvas, depending on the size.
I can paint for 10 hours per day when I have time; when I’m busy with my other human rights work, I still paint at least 3-4 hours per day since I wake up at 5.
While I paint, I like to listen to conferences on topics like archeology, anthropology, mythology, philosophy, history, and history of art; and audiobooks, documentaries, and music on YouTube.
Lately, I’ve been listening a lot to Pink Floyd, for instance, and all of this gives me plenty of new ideas, and also helps me learn new things. So, I educate and heal myself by painting and expressing myself. I like to compare myself to a medieval monk, hand-writing and decorating a copy of the Gospel or the Bible or transcribing some forgotten ancient Greek book on a parchment.
Where do you draw inspiration from for your work? Do you have any specific references?
My inspiration comes from a variety of sources across ages. You can find in my work references to surrealism, futurism, cubism, orphism, suprematism, pop art, psychedelic art, and conceptual art: I am influenced by artists like Dali, Picasso, Magritte, De Chirico, Balla, Boccioni, Delaunay, Malevich, Klee, Kandinsky, Leger, Domenico Gnoli, but also Haring, Lichtenstein, Warhol, as well as the Greek and Roman classics, mythology, and prehistoric art. I also admire more figurative artists, from Guttuso to Leonardo Cremonini, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Lucien Freud.
I am also inspired by music. I grew up listening to Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Lee Scratch Perry, Max Romeo, Steel Pulse, Third World, Abyssinians, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Inti-Illimani, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, George Gershwin, Georges Brassens, Serge Gainsbourg, Paul Simon, Franco Battiato, Pink Floyd and all the concept music from the 70s.
I was also reading a lot of books, especially Russian novels, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, but also Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi, Franz Kafka, and Yiddish stories, and always in a random order, Camus, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Pirandello, Svevo, Moravia, Morante, Calvino, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Malamud.
I also like cinema and especially Kubrick. I also love Woody Allen, the Cohen brothers, John Landis, Quentin Tarantino, Sergio Leone, and all the great Italian directors of the 60s and the 70s, Germi, Comencini, Scola, Monicelli; and actors that are also true geniuses like Paolo Villaggio, Gian Maria Volonté. Today, my favorite Italian directors are Bellocchio, Sorrentino, Garrone.
Currently, as I am working on my Radioactive Beasts project, my key sources of inspiration are, of course, George Orwell, but also Aldous Huxley, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Pink Floyd, especially LPs like Animals or Atom Heart Mother.
Tell us more about The Radioactive Beasts series. How did you come up with this idea and how did you translate it into artworks?
Like everyone else, when Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, I felt very bad and very scared. I joined a spontaneous demonstration at the Place des Nations in Geneva, in front of the UN headquarters. A lot of people went there with Ukrainian flags, peace flags, and prayers, and there was no political control over that first gathering. People were there with their children, some cried, and everyone was emotional. It was clear that a red line had been crossed that day.
In those days, I painted a first painting dedicated to this ominous war, called ‘The Dead Souls’, from the homonymous novel by the Ukraine-born Russian writer Nikolaj Gogol.
The dead souls (2022) © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
It’s the last painting of the FALLING ANGELS SERIES and a very pessimistic one, depicting all these Ukrainian and Russian young people sent to die for concepts and ideas that the world had already decided to ban forever after two world wars, and here they are again: imperialism, nationalism, fascism.
In the name of these ideas, and to benefit in the end the arms industry, by now over 350.000 young people have already died, as if they had just sunk and disappeared in the Black Sea, so the painting represented those sorts of ‘Munch screams’ colored like the flags of the two countries, precipitating in a bottomless abyss of darkness and despair, forever.
But after these first days, very quickly, the spontaneous solidarity of everyone for Ukraine and the Ukrainians has been politically kidnapped. I went to a second demonstration for peace in Ukraine, always in Geneva, and I remember there were already speakers calling for a ‘No Fly Zone’ over Ukraine. I told myself, weren’t they neutral here! Now it looks like they all want another World War.
And the same happened everywhere, in all media, and both sides have their propaganda. However, we should have better information here in our democracies, than in Russia!
But for over one year, the majority of our media has not been helpful at all. Instead of informing the public adequately and helping find rational solutions to this very serious issue, they imposed a one-sided narrative that is visibly not helping Ukraine and the Ukrainians, as the conflict prolongs and the death and destruction toll increases, but is only meant to shut the mouth of those who are expressing concerns about the military escalation and the forceful remilitarization of the world.
In Italy, for instance, many journalists are reduced today to mere war propagandists. I wonder whether they really think that they and their families will survive in case of a nuclear disaster. From their mouths, we’ve been hearing, and we continue to hear, a contemporary version of Orwell’s Newspeak, all they are saying is that War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
The Last Dawn (Nuclear Cockfight), acrylic markers on canvas, 2022 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
War Is Peace, acrylic and markers on canvas, 2023 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
So, this is how the association with Orwell came about. All of Orwell’s work continues to be relevant and adaptable to the crazy world we live in, from 9/11 to the war on terror to the Coronavirus and now the prodromes of the third world war.
The real names may have changed, but we can see the Napoleons and the Snowballs, and we see the cocks fighting for power and the hens starved to death, the dogs barking, the cows setting up a loud lowing, and the sheep precipitating in the radioactive hell that they wished for.
My Radioactive Beasts are an act of rebellion and revolt against all these Dr. Strangelove, vile propagandists and arms dealers that gamble with our lives and the lives of our children, and the planet.
The Radioactive Beasts do not accept to die because humans went crazy, so they asked me, EMA, to help them send out an SOS, and remind the world that, especially when it comes to nuclear superpowers, ‘the most unfair peace is better than the most righteous war’ (Cicero).
So, I started working on this project in October 2022; I decided to use much less oil and much more acrylic and acrylic markers, especially neon colors, to represent radioactivity, and to develop a sharper trait and style, with the intention to attract attention from young people and also create a collectible production for the NFT and digital market on top of selling my physical paintings.
Quite funnily, to do this peace project, I used a lot the Molotow acrylic markers. But they work very well, and I hope that someone in the Molotow company will read this interview and will send me free equipment in exchange for the good words I am spending about them.
I started work in October 2022, just after running a series of Lucid Dreaming exhibits the months before with my 2020-2022 works. Since then, I completed eight Radioactive Beasts (Ascending Pigs, Neutral Cows, The Nuclear Cockfight, Let There be Donkey, Fatal Eggs, Suicidal Sheep, War Is Peace and Last Came The Cat), out of a planned 30 (loosely inspired by Animal Farm characters) to be produced in 2023-24. You can see the artworks on my website, and they will soon be available in NFT versions.
From 21 to 27 April 2023, I will exhibit my Radioactive Beasts in New York, on a giant billboard in Times Square, as part of ‘Exploring the World’, a collective art show organized by the East Village Art Collection - EVAC Gallery.
Meanwhile, I am developing a partnership with the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize laureate ICAN - International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, who supported the adoption of the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and will also participate in, and support my Radioactive Beasts show in New York.
My intention now is to bring more artists to work around this goal and build a Collective of Artists for Dialogue Between Nuclear Powers, and with their help, produce and disseminate a lot of quality artworks across different forms of art to further this objective and sensitize international public opinion.
In the past couple of years, since reconnecting with art, you have had significant experiences and exhibited on different occasions. What do you think about the art community and market?
I have been a prolific producer for the last three years now, but I only started to showcase and market my works in June 2022. As I said, at the beginning it was just a way of expressing myself, motivated by Covid-19 and other circumstances of my life, old and new love stories, and my personal interests and passions. I was not thinking of really investing in a career as a painter. It was just a hobby, although I took it quite seriously.
In 2022, I was going to turn 50, and since many friends were pushing me to exhibit my works, I decided to hold an exhibition in Geneva as an opportunity to also throw a party with all my friends.
Luckily a few months before I had met Inna, my partner (who happens to also be born in Ukraine), and she helped me a lot to put things together for the various exhibitions from June to October 2022. In June, I held my first Lucid Dreaming show in Geneva, presenting some 40 works, collages, paintings, and photographs, all things you find on my website.
I was invited to replicate the show by galleries in Montecarlo and Zug (Switzerland), and I also started to sell my first paintings; then in November, I was invited to presented selected works at the International Pen Show in Turin, and then again, on the occasion of the European Hotel Awards, at Hotel Fairmont, Geneva.
Whosoever diggeth a pit, shall fall in it, oil on canvas, 2022 © Enrico Muratore Aprosio
So I decided to take things a bit more seriously and act strategically: I launched myself in the Radioactive Beasts project, also conceived as an NFT project targeting young art lovers, and I also set-up a team, my daughters (who are also artists on their own) help me, Letizia manages my website, and Alexandra produces short films with my paintings.
Inna helps me with all the rest, she drives me around to the shows and to purchase equipment, she’s also an interior designer and helps a lot with the set-up of my shows; she’s amazing at doing all the things I’m not able to do. Together, we interact a lot with the Geneva art community, we go to vernissages, art fairs, and that’s how we like to enjoy life. There are some very good artists in Geneva and the rest of Switzerland and I am eager to meet and collaborate with them.
Penetrating the art market is a challenge for everyone and the present times do not bode well for art sales, at least among new and emerging artists. People are going through insecurity and not many are those who are ready to pay for sometimes quite expensive artworks. Plus, a lot of gallerists make more money from new artists seeking visibility than by selling artworks. Others prefer to just trade in the secondary market, dealing only with established artists. It’s more a sort of financial investment than an interest in art and especially in contemporary art.
I also studied a little the art market, thanks to the many resources available online, and bought a couple of books, like Jerry Saltz’s book, which is not only about the art market, but about the profession of artist, and my conclusion is that if you have any ambition to find your place, well, you have to go to New York, if you find an opportunity.
I was already planning to return to New York, this time not for meetings at the UN, but to go for galleries and vernissages, when in late December, I was contacted by the Head curator of the EVAC gallery, Steven Hirsch, who expressed interests in my work. Since then, I undertook the preparation of my Radioactive Beasts show in Times Square, which will take place from 21 to 27 April 2022. I am also super happy that ICAN decided to support my show, and really look forward to seeing what will happen!
What are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?
As I said, I am going to New York for my first show there, I am developing the partnership with ICAN, and I am taking steps to increase the visibility of my Radioactive Beasts and develop the Collective of Artists for Dialogue Between Nuclear Powers. I will be busy with these plans and also with new Radioactive Beasts that I will continue producing and the set-up of my first NFT collection. Also, I am partnering with the Nepali writer Saurav Thapa by doing the cover of his new book 'The Absurdist of Kathmandu', which will be released this month of April, I think. I like to partner with other artists from other arts. For instance, in 2022, I participated, along with my artwork, in the video Caballo Regala'o by the Cuban artist Alberto Castillon and his salsa band. Plus, I continue to do my human rights work. I have been very busy in Central Africa lately. So, 2023 will be a very intense year, and, I hope, we will have positive surprises and developments.
Finally, what is one lesson you learnt recently? And how did it help you further develop your art?
I learnt that to make our way in art, like in any sector of life, we have to believe in what we do. And believe in ourselves. Or if we don’t, who will? So, I am going to take my chance, doing something I believe in. Another thing I learnt is, when one door is closed, many more are open. It’s never late to pursue our dreams. And I’m rediscovering myself, at least!
