Delio Jasse

Artist, Milan

«[As a migrant] my life,  my movements, my rights, depended solely and exclusively on a stamp or a document, sometimes on how the employee woke up that day. For this reason, stamps and inscriptions are recurrent in my work».

Tell us about how social reality has influenced your work?

One aspect that has greatly influenced my work is my experience as a migrant in Europe, in particular the concrete experience of bureaucracy. Like my life, therefore my movements, my rights, depended solely and exclusively on a stamp or a document, sometimes on how the employee woke up that day. For this reason, stamps and inscriptions taken from various documents, both mine and those of anonymous people, are recurrent in my works: there is often no logical or obvious connection between the documentary element (stamp, etc.) and the images represent the uncertainty of bureaucracy.

Tell us about a recurring theme that has continued or can often be found in your work over the years and why?

All my work revolves around the concept of archives, which is almost a kind of obsession for me. Not only am I always looking for new images in second-hand markets and on the Internet, but also the images I take as archive images. So I catalog them, I let them "rest" for months and so on. For me the archive is a way to look at the past from another point of view and to discover historical issues and problems that at first glance are not so clear.

What would you say to your 13 year old self ?

I would tell him not to rush, that sooner or later things happen.

What changes do you hope to see in your sector in Italy in the next 5-10 years?

I hope that the photographic image is not trivialized but respected. We are continually overwhelmed by images and I am afraid that this leads to a trivialization of photography as a practice.