Magical fetishism: entering the world of Milan-based Vincenzo Zancana is a visual stimulating experience among relics calling for contemplation, absorption and unconscious obsession. Artistic research becomes a self-diagnosis in communication with the lived environment.

Vincenzo Zancana is a multidisciplinary Italian artist working between sculpture, photography, printmaking and installation. Researching the long-lasting attachment of humans to icons, idols, and fetish objects, the artist builds up his own visual vocabulary of relics absorbing his obsessions for unfolding the three-dimensionality of bidimensionality. From printmaking to spatial installations, Zancana proves the fluid and ever-changing nature of contemporary images, which can camouflage in alien forms that are to the human eye an image after all. By talking of the mutational image we talk of the irremediable human search for icons and rituals - outside the religious sphere.

What is the obsession - if we can call it so - or fetish motivating your artistic research?

I am very attracted to the word obsession, and also enthralled by the term fetish indirectly. They are two macro themes that need to be developed together, where one is indispensable to the other. Personally, the term fetishism does not only refer to the sexual sphere, which definitely remains extant, but it regards also and above the magic, ritual and mystical world. I believe that humans use fetish objects, which are relics that 'absorb' part of us, becoming idols and totems unconsciously. I am interested in understanding how this mechanism is established, how an object can become so 'powerful' and contemplative. I can say that my research indirectly becomes a kind of self-diagnosis that seeks to analyse the link I establish with the elements present within my research.

Religious icons mingle with icons of desire related to the sexual sphere. Could you expand on the relation of religious and sexual desire built in your works?

This answer adds more to the previous one. Specifically, I would like to give one of the most widespread definitions of the term fetishism: “Form of primitive religiousness, mostly of a magical or animistic character, founded on the worship of material objects.”
I think the relationship you name between religious and sexual desire is more definable by the term "constraint” . It is probably the imposition of constraints and dogmas that affects both desires. This belief of mine is influenced by cultural background, being from Sicily, where religiosity is very much felt, to the point of misrepresenting the relationship between religion and spirituality. Most people do not have an individual spirituality, but a more collective one. You get to have a mechanism of decay where the individual is precisely forced into certain spiritual dynamics that are not perceived as personal. Just as it happens in sexuality where one is a slave to a concept or idea. I don't go and do if others don't go and do, and so on. I think it is interesting to associate two things that are extremely distant but actually very close. In our religious culture, the cross for example is nothing more than a fetish, an object that makes us believe we are safer and closer to our spirituality. Indeed, adult sex life often finds support and reassurance from fetishes that convey sexual arousal and the attainment of ecstasy.

Being primarily a printmaker, your works are highly influenced by bidimensionality. How do you play with it, specifically in regards to the space your art pieces are installed in?

I have always put myself as a limit the bidimensionality of printing, but it is interesting in fact how it turns into a driving force that allows me to extend in installations. I personally think that the term bidimensional is reductive, a single image can contain a sort of three dimensionality: how it would relate in space and the various ways it would assume. As quoting the word ‘printing’: it is banally a sheet of paper that has conventionally two dimensions but always a thickness that distracts us from its bidimensional surface. My works are designed as the union of multiple levels (like pieces of puzzle) that take shape in their own autonomy. I think that the bidimensional dimension in my art pieces has become a strength until today.

Your works have a recognisable photographic nature - both in their referentiality to something else and in their very process of forming. How does photography enter your creative work?

I am heavily influenced by my graphic training, so I perceive a photograph as the set of multiple images. I deal with photography as if it was a plastic material, thus a sculpture molded by digital means. I adopt a sampling method when I design my works through photography: I draw from a personal photographic archive which is catalogued into macro thematic or storylines; in some cases I extract parts of an image, may it be a color, a corner, a shape or a pixel.

What’s boring about photography as we traditionally know and understand it?

To me photography is a means to reach an objective. I think that the use of the photographic medium as a narrative of images is a very well-established way, but in some cases “boring”. In a non-traditional approach, I use photography not only as a technical tool but also as a means of expression, a stage passage that allows me to get to more complex systems.

Where’s your current research heading?

My current research is based on the concept of borders and specifically on how the environment and the physical limitation interact with each other. Together with my collective Chárōn, I am working on an exhibition that will be held next October at Spazio Lampo in Chiasso. The Chárōn project is a series of collective interventions with natural dynamics by analyzing the contemporary anthropocene. The introduction is to awaken public sensitivity through contemporary art by activating open dialogue, without advancing any activist or accusatory vision. In the recent period this type of method is increasingly present in my research; I specifically deal with the natural – landscape aspect, the anthropocene and the concept of inhabited space. This space is meant not only as a modification of ecological processes but also cultural, environmental and memorial changes.