Laurent Fiorentino                         
                            Work - Info

Camera Apocrifa

2019-2020

Camera Apocrifa is a research of symbolism. It is the attempt to recreate a lost rituality facing a disillusioned and pragmatic reality.

Everything starts in the protected and at the same time constrained space of a bedroom. The bed becomes the altar, the body is a religious offering, the Eucharist to be consumed. Everyday objects can transmute and be infused with significance, becoming ex-votos.

Growing up in the Catholic (stepped in paganism) influence of Naples, I, however, have never been part of the religious community. I take here the freedom to render a personal and deviant cult. I set up series of illogical rituals, hunted by images of martyrs. All those Saint-Sebastians and Christs resonate in my memories confusing suffering with orgasm, bodies in which I projected an ambivalent and forbidden desire. The body, just a burden to deny in Christianity, here it becomes the hose of spirituality and the desire its symptom.

The phallic presence hunts and relieve. Repulsion and attraction are the rhythm of the dynamic that moves the project. How to dismount an oppressive toxic masculinity? How to reconcile that ambivalent relation?

Between references and reappropriations those images are a space to project desire, to affirm dissonance and to organically building up a spirituality. It is a struggle against rejection. It is an apocryphal passion.