Three by Three: Guest Artists in Focus
QUESTION 2. Your collaboration as a duo has a distinctive energy—almost like a shared consciousness in motion. How do you navigate individual ideas while creating a unified artistic voice?
ANSWER 2. There is no conflict between us. Since the first day we met, we have always shared everything: meals, sexuality, living spaces (even the littlest ones). Ideas are spontaneous and usually complete each other. Our performances contain the same amount of psychological/bodily fatigue for both of us. Like in the performance Silvia Overcomes Depression: Massimo holds Silvia in arms for about 30 minutes with a few pauses and Silvia talks about her mental health and sexual harassment. In The Circle Of Dirtiness And Cleanliness Massimo keeps on soiling himself with mud and Silvia cleans him up continuously and gets as dirty as him in the process. In Horrifascism we hold the banner for hours like equal columns. So no leader is needed.
Silvia Marcantoni Taddei & Massimo Sannelli
Multi-Media Artists
MEDIUM: video, photography, body acts; Stage Name: AnimaeNoctis
BIO: Silvia decided to change her life after years of severe depression, anxiety and eating disorder + a school education that didn’t fit her tendency to be a shapeshifter. Massimo was used to being a poet, but he needed more corporeal evidence and less solitude. Poetry didn’t fit his tendency to be a shapeshifter. 2 multidisciplinary beings survive and escape the night of the souls. This is the very meaning of their dual name: animae noctis, souls of the night. Not what they are now, but what they used to be.
AnimaeNoctis is a multi-medial duo launched in 2019: Silvia Marcantoni Taddei (November 26, 1994) & Massimo Sannelli (November 27, 1973). They are musicians, filmmakers, photographers, models, performers, 3D item makers, publishers, post-porn artists, dancers, activists via art. They live in Novi Sad, Serbia.
WEBSITE: AnimaeNoctis
QUESTION 3. The recurring themes of transformation, time, and the unseen run throughout your performances and films. What draws you to these motifs, and how do you reimagine them from project to project?
ANSWER 3. There is a strong age gap between us: 21 years. So time is a major topic for us, but it’s never a trigger. Also we happened to share very similar experiences in different years. In order to live and work together we had to change everything. Finally, we left Italy. We live in Serbia and we still roam a lot. Plus, both of us are nonbinary people. So we invent nothing: we only have to feature the biological substance we deal with.
QUESTION 1. You intentionally work with minimal technology—often just an old mobile phone. What creative possibilities open up when limitations become part of the artistic language rather than an obstacle?
ANSWER 1. As our bodies are not flawless due to our past issues, we think the best way to photograph and film them is a not-flawless technique: the old mobile phone + free software. As our performances avoid too many figments or have no figments at all we are used to showing things that we do in real life (yes, we work out a lot, every day). That’s why we often say that our art is an ongoing documentary. If we happen to use masks, we ourselves make them and of course they are very raw. We use the simplest tools ever: the same ones we would have used as desperate teenagers with little means. All of this is not a strategy, it came so naturally to us. And it works.
Novi Sad - Amorous Screams + Dreams
Silvia Overcomes Depression
The Circle Of Dirtiness And Cleanliness.
All copyright and reproduction rights are reserved by Silvia Marcantoni Taddei & Massimo Sannelli / AnimaeNoctis.
Artwork may not be reproduced in any form without the artist's express written permission.
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