“He often wonders if the problem of the relationship with the sphere is not by its very nature irresolvable. Now the sphere is not always before his eyes, and yet even when he moves away, even when he steps aside or hides, the sphere acts, and he feels that the universe has a certain shape precisely because it has to house the sphere.” G. Manganelli, Centuria, racconto ottantasei, Adelphi, Milan 1995.

c.p. Let’s start from the Rewind (1997/2000) photos. A sort of freeze-frame of reality. What was it about this work that interested you?

s.g. I was interested in being able to capture an instant. Like holding your breath for a moment. You can’t think of stopping a gust of wind.
But by using waste paper and rubbish, adhesive tape and string, having it all a bit patched together and free of deceit, I don’t know,
I somehow felt I could unhinge the impossibility of thought. With a sort of levity.

c.p. It’s as though you approach daily life looking for clues that might help cast doubt on logic, and on experience, visual perception,
and on the mental processes we use to give meaning to things.

s.g. Yes, more than clues, these are real voids in reality itself. I sometimes think I can see sort of little doors into reality that let you
experience parallel worlds. They’re like mistakes grafted onto our structures of perception and thought – and they’re essential.

c.p. This is the process you bring into the Pause (1999) performance, I believe.

s.g. Absolutely. People doing things like jumping, beating or knocking up a ball, give the impression of a solid, static image.
But this picture is created by an extremely rapid movement to the rhythm of a stroboscope. The very loud noise on the wooden
platform makes you feel the energy and speed behind the static image. It was a like producing a waste of energy.
A little explosion that was an end in itself. You were there – you might have seen it better than me because you were outside of it.
What was it like?

c.p. The effect was disconcerting. Judging by the noise, you got the impression there was a mass of movement.
But actually the picture was still. Rather than wondering about how it worked (actually, after a while the mechanism became fairly clear),
it was fascinating to let yourself be carried along by the absurdity of it all. Perhaps what really matters is, as you say, that it “produced
a waste of energy”. What we generally consider a waste of energy may actually be the opening up of another dimension. What you think?

s.g. “Waste” as an end in itself is an absolutely abstract entity I’d like to move towards.
But the second law of thermodynamics, my Catholic education, the structure of films, and other things, don’t let me have real awareness of
this “end”. I always let myself be deceived (and am fascinated) by the passage to another dimension and by the idea of another possibility.

c.p. Also in the Absolute Horizon of the Event (1999) video, the narrative, like the protagonist, starts off in another direction, sliding
towards a place that does not exist, away from the reality that is clearly recognisable in areas around Porta Garibaldi station in Milan,
where you shot the video.

s.g. It’s a sort of void zone. It’s the idea of going along a normal street and finding an invisible obstacle. The man draws this space and
tells us about it as though he were a mimic, giving it shape by the very fact that he can’t move forwards. A non-space that exists.
I’ve always seen it as a stargate, a door that takes you somewhere.

c.p. True, the moment actor Ivano Marescotti trips up over a sort of black hole – a transparent box that he can’t in any way get over or around,
and by which for an instant he is swallowed up and disappears – is a leap into another reality. A suspension. But then he comes out of it again,
a few seconds later, and continues on his way as though nothing had happened. It’s as though the passageway remained open.

s.g. Sure, there probably is a transformation, but we can’t see it. He continues on his way, whistling as though it were nothing, as though
he had met something impossible to understand but which, for five minutes, had taken him somewhere else.

c.p. I like the down-to-earth, everyday language you chose for this video.

s.g. These are simple, slightly conscious choices. The shooting is all from a stand, staying ahead of the actor’s movements and moving around
him, and the rhythm is very slow. Almost real time.

c.p. To get back to the idea of the passageway, which sounds interesting: what’s your view of it?

s.g. The passageway is something of an existential decision, resting on others and being carried along, just out of trust. Every image is in
a certain sense a passageway.

c.p. So it’s a crossing or an accompanying?

s.g. It’s both. Because it’s like going over a limit. You open a door and let yourself be carried away. It’s like the Stendhal syndrome in
which a painting or a view grips you so much as to captivate you and carry you off. A truck driver can do the same thing on a highway.

c.p. You talked of trust, which in a certain sense is a fundamental aspect of your work. In Untitled, 2000, for example, the pictures in
which you photographed furniture from old country houses, against which the outline of a dwarf stands out like a mysterious figure who has
just passed through the pieces. The observer needs to rely on you, and have trust, following the picture. In this case, using photography is
indeed like putting up an obstacle: invisible but deviant.

s.g. Yes, it’s the medium that lets me create a distance which makes verification impossible, and thus makes trust essential. It’s a sort of
preferential point of view. Using little objects that pop up at the edge of the picture – such as other pieces of furniture, a fireplace,
or an old photo – I lead and guide the observer into a different atmosphere. Then, one step further on, the imprecision and the manual nature
of the design of the furniture bring about a feeling of trust and hospitality, in which the hole in the furniture becomes like a sort of
popular belief you can rely on.

c.p. Here we move from reality to legend. An area your work goes into a lot. What do you look for in legends?

s.g. It’s just an idea from popular tradition, which these pictures refer back to, but I don’t know of any particular legend in this case.
No, someone once told me about the story of a dwarf at the foot of the bed. But it’s not important. I was interested in referring to the
dwarf and to his potential condensed energy, to a possible grandfather’s room out in the country, to a late nineteenth-century piece of
furniture and the atmosphere of popular legend... Like all the elements that suggest and increase the intensity of the “hole” in the photo.

c.p. Where did you get the idea for these photos from?

s.g. I got it by thinking of the possibility of making space in solid matter as though it were air. Infinitely enlarged, everything we
consider as an object actually has more space in it than solid matter. Dwarfs, who are really just little people, do however have a unique
intensity, which I think is strong enough even to make space inside old furniture.

c.p. What sort of intensity?

s.g. It’s a sort of parallel reality – an aura, if you like – that occurs in certain conditions. It’s a constant in all my works, and in
some of them it’s the key element. Examples include the radioactive samurai, the sword forged from a meteorite, or the Aosta performance.
Often it’s like a chain reaction: you put a few elements together, they create bonds between themselves, and they become something else.

c.p. In the radioactive samurai, (Untitled, 200), the concentrated energy in the chemical element encounters energy – in other words,
intensity – from the story embodied in the myth of the samurai. Is this juxtaposition of energies important?

s.g. It’s the reason I chose the samurai, the strongest, most mysterious warrior. And also the craziest, if you like. And, not by accident,
I put potassium in his bowels – which for the samurai is where the soul resides. I thought that by putting together all these things – the
historical references to the samurai, the potassium placed in the belly, the small sculpture of almost sacred dimensions, the relationship
between any radioactive material and all that this word conveys, a warrior bearing a soul of energy and death, the fact that this energy is
basically invisible, and then the Geiger counter that almost gives the rhythm of life, pulsating with an irregular bip, bip, bip... As I was
saying, putting all these things together was a way of making a little bomb, designed to remain unexploded, but packed with potential energy.

c.p. And the sword forged with the meteorite? Can you describe it?

s.g. The sword has a similar origin to that of the samurai. It’s a sword made from a ferrous Sikhote-Alin meteorite. The sword is accompanied
by texts and pictures illustrating the history of the meteorite and the various steps that were involved in the creation of the sword.
What I find even more exciting is the fact that here we have a piece of iron, which is no more than a piece of rather impure metal, but
which comes from the ring of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Further than any human being, as far as our official knowledge is aware,
has ever been. I don’t remember the moment I decided it was to be a sword and not something else – I think it was always to be a sword, as
though that were implicit in the substance of the meteorite. When I went to buy the pieces of the Sikhote-Alin from a collector of meteorites,
I also got a book called Cosmic Debris - Meteorites in History, by John G. Burke, where it says that a knife forged from a ferrous meteorite
was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Amazing, isn’t it?

c.p. These two works are concentrates of cosmic, chemical and historical energy, though in your work one can feel an extraordinarily powerful
energy of a different sort: the Tour Fromage di Aosta performance. Where does this energy come from?

s.g. I think it comes from all sorts of different elements, as it does for the other two works: the dwarf, in itself a smaller-than-average
person, carries with it all the mythology of the freak and the strange characters of popular legend. It conjures up forests and there is a
whole range of fantasy literature that has settled in our ability to reason. Then there is the human presence which, when it is contextualised
in a museum, acquires a psychological distance from the public: when an actor performs, he enters a parallel world which, even though it is
so close we feel we could touch it, creates an insuperable obstacle, like a wall of energy.
And what is more, this character tries to hide (and we can perceive its fear) but at the same time it attacks us when it feels cornered,
screaming at the top of its voice and running wildly among us. These are all unusual forms of behaviour at the opening of an exhibition.
We are afraid of anything that attracts our attention and energy, and that has a rhythm and a sound that differs from what we are used to.

c.p. Can you tell us about this work?

s.g. A little character, a strange dwarf (Orfeo Orlando) wanders through the Tour Fromage during the opening. He is looking for a place to
hide, in the corners, under the stairs. When he finds too many people around him, he feels cornered and starts screaming, and races off to
find another spot.
The character is inspired by the legend of the Wild Man. Tradition tells of a population of little people who lived in the Alps. They were
long-haired and bearded, small and stocky, but with extraordinary strength. Extremely shy, they were rarely seen. It’s said they were easily
enchanted, like children or poets, but that they had immense moral and practical knowledge. They were claustrophobic, living in the depths
of nature, and they had no notion of time. This is the legend, but I feel sure there really was a population like this.

c.p. It’s true that the energy aspect of these works is very closely linked to the public’s reaction.

s.g. I’d go so far as to say it exists only in the psyche of the public. Let me give an example: if I say the word “radioactive”, do you
simply think of the chemical structure of an element which, as it is unstable, emits radiation? Or wouldn’t Chernobyl, Hiroshima, a sense of
danger, stories of depleted uranium, or the Cold War, first spring to mind?

c.p. The sense of the work is given by this interweaving of chain reactions built on true, presumed or imagined references that suddenly
break out into pictures. One ends up by tripping up over them, as though they were an obstacle – visible, this time, but not entirely
decipherable...

s.g. Each individual element of the work gives us an indication, a means of interpretation that may exist on a number of levels. It is the
public that then reconstructs it, always differently, according to their cultural background and desires.

c.p. Also in the work you are preparing for MACRO – in which you exhibit a classical sculpture in a contemporary art museum – you involve the
public in an intense and direct, almost sensual, relationship with the work.

s.g. The project involves requesting the loan of an antique sculpture from the Capitoline Museums. One immediate interpretation might be that
this is a ready-made taken to the highest degree: decontextualising a work of art in order to make it become a work of art once more. But I’m
interested in this short-circuit only up to a certain point. My challenge is to be able to forget all this once we find ourselves in front
of the sculpture. It’s a punch in the stomach that only certain works of art can give you. And when faced with a painting, or a film, or a
book, you’re forced to go on a journey, to move outside your body. The impact with a sculpture implies a real, physical relationship.
It doesn’t hit the mind, but the stomach. It demands an approach just like that of having sex. By creating a “special” area and using cinema
lights, I’d like to be able to elevate the sensual potential and the intensity of the sculpture to its highest degree.

c.p. The sculpture concerned is the Wounded Amazon in the Capitoline Museums. What appealed to you in this work?

s.g. I find it has great intensity, in the sense that it manages to transform into perception the complexity of the history it brings with it.
First of all, the mythology of the Amazons, the population of female warriors. Then it manages to combine a sense of typically masculine
strength with a degree of delicate femininity in the pose.
I find it interesting how in Ancient Greece – which is, after all, the cradle of our “Western culture” – much more attention was given to
studying the idea of diversity than that of beauty. If we think of the position of women in Ancient Greece, the Amazons must have been
viewed as a sort of monstrosity. A civilisation with interchangeable roles in society was unthinkable.
The war against the Amazons was the Greeks’ first great victory against a barbarian population, which until then had been invincible, and I
can’t help thinking of a symbolic and cultural victory of man over woman. I’m not talking of feminism: what I’m interested in is the ambiguity
of the legend of the Amazons. It was considered so important as to be shown on the Parthenon, and so unresolved that even today it still has
us talking about the possibility of equal roles for men and women.
There’s a picture that I find conveys the sense of this complexity: when Achilles killed the queen of the Amazons during the siege of Troy,
he fell in love with her dying face.

c.p. Why did you choose an ancient sculpture to achieve this sensuality?

s.g. Because I think every individual eye, and thus every personal judgement, increases the value and the intensity of a work.
A sort of sedimentation of its aura. There’s a lovely piece in Don De Lillo’s White Noise in which Jack, the protagonist, goes off with a
friend, Murray, to see the most often visited stables in America. “Being here is a sort of spiritual capitulation. We only see what others
see. The thousands of people who have been here in the past, and those who will come in the future. We agree to take part in a collective
perception. This literally gives colour to our vision. A religious experience, in a certain sense, like any form of tourism.” This was
followed by further silence. “What can this stable have been like before it was photographed?” asks Murray, “What can it have looked like,
what made it different from others, and what made it similar? Questions to which we can’t reply because we have read the road signs, we’ve
seen the people taking snapshots. We can’t get out of the aura. We’re part of it. We’re here, we’re now. He appeared immensely satisfied.”

c.p. In Di De Lillo’s book there’s a fascinating overlapping between reality and the image of reality, like what you create in your works.
It’s as though at a certain point the story prevailed over reality. But it’s only the sensation of an instant. Then everything goes back
to what it was before. But that disengagement is enough to shift sense and significance.

s.g. It’s precisely in the disengagement, in the distance, that things happen.

c.p. Also in your A Walk in Paradise video (2002), there’s a break – a fraction of the second in which time is suspended – and the story
starts off in another direction. In this video, you consider what is relatively recent history –the postwar period – and not a dimension
that belongs to legend, as in the case of the Amazon. But here too you surprise the public with a totally unexpected solution of great
emotional impact – when the two old protagonists meet and make love. It’s as though the past - history with all its references - were
springing back to life in the present. In the sensuality and intensity of the meeting between the two aged protagonists, two former
resistance fighters, a man and a woman who had been in love during the last war and now meet each other again. What is it that interests
you about history?

s.g. Sometimes it interests me as a source, but I’ve always used it in an incidental manner. A Walk in Paradise, which is a plot-based short,
is about the meeting of two aged people when they were young. The fact that they were resistance fighters during the Second World War gave
me an extremely intense historic setting. The fact that the two met during the war also made it possible for them to lose sight of each
other. And that they should be interesting and brave people, without having to explain anything else about them. What I was interested
in was seeing two old people making love.

c.p. Like this, the borderline between history and legend, between truth and assumption becomes vague.

s.g. I like to think there are lots of things that the official history of the West is unable to understand. That outside the world of the
media and common knowledge, there are a number of islands that escape the domination of communication and somehow maintain existing levels
of balance in the world.

c.p. In Untitled (2001/2003), ten monumental pictures in which you paint “true” stories of spectres, one gets the impression of an
overlapping of worlds. Like a stratification of reality. These works remind me of Paul Auster’s Ghosts in his New York Trilogy, in which
everything seems normal, though that, apparently, is only what it seems. In the beginning there is Blue, Auster starts out. Later there is
White, and after that Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. It is Brown who weaned him, Brown who taught him the craft, and when
Brown grew old Blue took his place. That’s how it starts: the place is New York, the time is the present, neither one nor the other will
ever change. Each day Blue goes to the office and sits at his desk waiting for something to happen. Nothing happens for a while, until a
man called White crosses the threshold, and that’s how it starts.

s.g. I’ll tell you how it ends: the journey may even not end in America. In my secret dreams I like to think that Blue books a passage on a
ship and sails off to China. Let him go to China then, and let’s leave it at that. Because this is when Blue stands up, puts on his hat and
goes out the door. From then on, we know nothing more.

c.p. You lived for a year in New York on a scholarship from the PSI Italian Studio Program. And then you went back and that’s where you
painted your latest series of pictures: Untitled (“Banditi” - Bandits). What are these stories?

s.g. They aren’t stories – they’re large portraits inspired by late-nineteenth-century bandits in Italy and America. I tried to find as many
photos as possible, as I was interested in them visually. I don’t know the stories, though I may read them some time, but I didn’t want to
be influenced while I was painting. I’m interested in the connection between the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century and these
people on the run. Some of the photos were taken in moments of glory, and the poses show a bellicose spirit, the power of outlawed warriors.
Others, on the other hand, were taken by the police after capture. Here there are clear signs of violence. Some are actually dead, but
photographed in gruesome settings to give the idea that they are still alive. There are also many women, some of them stunningly
beautiful. I am fascinated by the intensity in the eyes of this one that I chose, Michelina De Cesare. I’m interested in the sincerity
and in the candour, both of the people and of the photography that tells their story.

c.p. It’s a sort of simple truth.

s.g. It’s a taste that no longer exists.

c.p. If I’m not mistaken you made them for an exhibition

s.g. I’m showing them now at the Kunsthalle in Bremerhaven, where I’m a sort of “stowaway” on Tatjana Doll’s solo exhibition there. She’s a
Berlin artist I met at the PS1 and whom I started working with last summer under the name of Teufel.

c.p. What’s it about?

s.g. Teufel is a series of various types of event, but they all have a similar sort of energy. Even though we work in very different ways,
there’s a basic energy we have very much in common. The Bremerhaven exhibition is the second event in our project.

c.p. Let’s get back to the pictures of the bandits...

s.g. It seems they cannot shake off their status as outlaws: I took an empty cellar in New York City to paint them, then I rolled them up and
took them by plane to Milan, and then gave them to a forwarder who happened to be in Rome, and he took them first to Berlin and then to the
Blinder Passagier exhibition.

c.p. How did New York influence your work?

s.g. Is always hard to say, because as well as the city there is the influence of all the people I met, the films I saw, and the fact that I
hadn’t had a home for two years, I don’t know, it’s always hard to put changes down to a single reason. One thing that’s clear to me is that
I’ve got far more energy and a far quicker reaction time than I had two years ago.

c.p. How have you adjusted to life in Rome?

s.g. I’ve only just got here, but even though I’ve been lots of times I’ve never felt it as my “home”. I’ve got the impression it’s very
similar to New York, in the sense that you can get enormous benefits from it if you get on the right wavelength. I’m interested in highly
stratified cities, places where references to history become real. In New York City it’s the imaginary world of television and cinema that
becomes daily reality. Berlin, with its constant creation and destruction of architecture, maintains an extraordinary intensity. In Rome,
every stone gives visual access to history. You’ll probably think it’s a bit irrational, but I like to think that important events give
places energy.

c.p. I agree: Rome is a city where the sphere that Manganelli talks of might be found wandering around. It’s the only place where past,
present and future come together, where you always expect to catch sight of a reality that is not real, and yet is present. One that appears
in all your works and beckons us to follow, to observe the world, to delve into the past and view the future from a different angle.
The photograph with a piano you took in 1995 appeared in one of your first works.

s.g. Yes, a hand playing the piano is painted to camouflage it against the keys. You can see it only because it’s wrong: it’s not painted
carefully enough. A voluntary error that creeps in and lets you perceive a parallel reality. A quasi-parallel reality because – as in
Manganelli – everything is almost normal, almost habitual. It’s the “quasi” that acquires significance.