In what way does your painting manage to convey the message of corporeality and sexuality?
Iva Lulashi: Painting is a natural medium for me, my research starts from the frames of videos of various genres, particularly erotic and pornographic. The parts I’m going to capture are the ones less consumed by people, they are the moments in which the relationships are not yet so explicit, usually at the beginning or end of the videos. The images I propose are sometimes ambiguous and this brings greater naturalness and less disturbance to the user who, if he sees a direct act, tends to withdraw and consider it vulgar. The choice of frames is a chain reaction, I don’t watch a video from start to finish, they are moments, moments in which I capture images. I stop and then choose when I understand that there is space to intervene in the form of painting, they must be images open enough to be reinterpretedAnd.
What do you add to frames when they become paintings?
THE: They are small elements that can change the entire narrative of the image, they can be some stains, some perspectives, deletions, small additions, what contributes to personalizing the work. The titles are attributed somewhat with the same system as the images, I instinctively search the books and choose words that I put together, those that I believe can go well with the painting without adding a scenography or a story. If I have painted something and I tell it through the title the work ends, I am interested in creating ambiguity and mystery.
Your research has focused on eroticism and how it is perceived for years. How has your approach to this topic changed over the years?
THE: When I started dealing with this topic I was confronted with the period of communism in Albania, when all eroticism was censored, mine was a reaction, it was a desire to reiterate freedom of expression also because Albania was still permeated by that kind of ideology. Now these things are no longer heard but at the beginning of my research, even though I was in Italy, I understood that here too, as in Europe, there are many limits and controls.
What contribution can a work make in the context of such blocks and censorship?
THE: I think it can help normalize the idea of eroticism and human relationships, of the body with nature, which shows sexuality as a natural and primordial human gesture, a bit like the idea of the title: Love like a glass of water.
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