You’ve been involved in numerous antiwar projects and created a webcomic reflecting daily life during these challenging times. How do you approach the balance between activism and art in your work, and what message do you hope to convey to your audience?
In recent years, an unspeakable amount of pain has affected people worldwide. Sometimes, it feels like the world is irreparably broken in many ways. Even without mentioning the most significant aspect – violence towards thousands of people, broken lives, and intolerance – wars ignite. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s been a hard, life-changing moment for me, as it has been for many others. I’ve faced threats, humiliation, and persecution, along with my family and friends, for our beliefs. When everything falls into darkness, the only option we have left, I guess, is to preserve our experiences and keep telling the legend of the existence of light. Until the last one of us goes silent, there is still hope.
I had to leave my country for good, seeking political protection in Italy to continue speaking my truth and be able to work. The day when there would be no more political prisoners and victims of repression is coming. I don’t know if we’ll live to see this moment with our own eyes, but until then, I’ll try to keep doing what I do best – keep the dialogue on.



Studying literature and illustration in two different universities must have provided you with a diverse range of influences and skills. How do you incorporate elements of literature into your visual storytelling, and how has your background in teaching influenced your approach to creating and sharing your art?
It’s always exciting to see the links between different moments of life from a small distance because everything, or at least most of it, somehow starts making sense. Closer to the end of my art studies, it became clear that storytelling always led me forward more than anything else. One of my earliest memories is pretending to read a book to other kids in kindergarten before even learning how to read, using the illustrations in the ABC as a supporting tool to feel more secure. Then, I read every book I could find (except for the school program, obviously) during summer holidays, being equally excited about adult ones, from erotic cringe comedy to military chronicles.


This interest propelled me deeper into the visual art field, from illustration to animation, and later to comics, which I now find to be one of the most powerful and diverse mediums. With a philological background as a heavy anchor, storytelling feels like the only thing we really have as beings. I believe that stories make us who we are and give objects and concepts value.
Teaching gave me deep insight into the issue of originality and a better understanding of the skills development process. It expanded my toolbox but didn’t change existing patterns too much. Teaching was extremely enjoyable and definitely a crucial experience in other areas of life.



Your work often features rough shapes and neon colors, with characters and locations in constant transformation. Can you discuss how this visual style reflects your artistic vision and the themes you explore in your comics and animations?
The constant change of the world is extremely tiring. After years of adapting to dramatically fluid and unpredictable circumstances, there comes a need to learn to live in a new way – with the hard-received knowledge that none of the prognoses would be fulfilled at maximum. This influenced my work process, especially in comics, not letting me plan the whole thing scrupulously but working in small blocks, keeping my options open for any incoming ideas or corrections.
Considering that the tools we have for perceiving the world are pretty much imperfect, the world how we see it is a distorted and simplified version of itself, in other words – a hallucination. This way, whichever way I manage to depict the world, it would come out no less real than the one we consider to be real. Or maybe I’m just still in a childish period of extreme fascination with shiny bright contrasting things, and both of the explanations are simultaneously correct.


Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, is a condition you’ve recently discovered you have, which affects your ability to recognize and remember faces, including your own. How does this condition impact your creative process, and do you find ways to incorporate it into your storytelling?
I’ve read that this condition is different for everyone, so I can only share my own experience: basically, I cannot remember faces at all, including the faces I see daily and even my own. Particularly tricky are ‘standard pretty faces’; for me, all those look like characters from ‘Anomalisa’ by Charlie Kaufman. I have a general understanding of people’s appearances, but to differentiate them from one another, I use anything else rather than faces – walk, body shape, hairstyle, fashion choices, voice (very helpful!), but as soon as someone changes any element in their looks, my system falls apart. Even if I try to imagine faces, I mostly see a fluid moving pink mass, both awake and in my dreams.
It has a greater influence on more aspects of life than it seems, and discovering it helped me start working on different strategies to improve some affected areas. Especially in my work, the impact is significant – allowing myself to keep characters and surroundings fluid is much closer to my actual vision of the world. This way of navigating through life could be expressed clearer with images rather than words by putting the reader into the same situation of uncertainty that I live in. It only feels more honest and natural.



Currently, you’re part of the Italian comics artists collective Trincea Ibiza, where you recently released two experimental comic books. Can you tell us more about the collaborative process behind these projects and how you approach working with other artists?
Trincea Ibiza is an experimental collective aiming to work on the production of bold, complicated comics projects without the support of a weak publishing system, focusing more on quantity rather than quality. One of our latest releases is a small comic book, “Purple Empire,” created by Pablo Cammello and me. In this case, the experimental part of the story was the process – we were making a comics jam (a practice where the story is created in turns, without a pre-written script or even notes) one page at a time. I drew one page to immediately pass it further, impatiently waiting to see where Pablo would turn the vector of the story. After he draws his page, he sends it back, and now it’s up to me to decide what happens and how. Overall, this practice could be used in larger groups, and the method could vary. For example, each could draw just a single panel instead of a page. But either way, it’s fun and a really useful exercise even without a particular goal to end up with a finished story.
The main trick in projects of this kind, I guess, is to abandon personal artistic ambition as much as possible (or at least a bit) and focus on story development instead, investing in smoothness and collaboration rather than just unexpected plot twists.
The work on “Purple Empire” was stretched over three years, including the Russian war with Ukraine and infinite violations of freedom in Russia, which naturally found its reflection in the book. The story tells about the dictatorial world where the pink color is illegal, and only the group of crossdresser rebels could possibly save the day.


Experimentation and fusion of media seem to be central to your artistic approach. Are there any particular techniques or mediums you’re excited to explore further in your future projects?
It is so intriguing to research approaches from different fields and see how they could work together. The areas that I find the most attractive at the moment are a combination of AR, animation, and comics, and any kind of physical objects + illustration/comics. I would also be really happy to work with textile and clothing.



Looking ahead, what aspirations or goals do you have for your artistic career? Are there any specific themes or stories you’re eager to explore in your upcoming comics or animations?
I’m working on a bunch of short stories, which I plan to start releasing this year through Patreon or Substack as webcomics. They’ll be as fluid and neon as the rest of my work, exploring a variety of actual social issues from technological progress to identity theft in a genre of sci-fi, I guess? With a spoonful of psychological drama, three drops of splatter, a full bucket of aliens, and a sea of unfulfilled predictions. Overall, I would love to keep telling stories because it’s probably the best thing I can offer to reality.
Ideally, in the future, I’d want to tell a long and sincere story of my family during the invasion in Ukraine, but this could only be done when I have a guarantee of the safety of my dearest ones from Russian authorities. Maybe one day, though.


Our current theme is called “Sugar Rush”. If art is like eye candy, what would be your favourite sweet treat)?
I would say David O’Reilly and everything he does definitely fits under this description for me. It’s visually simple enough to be just sweet, but a bunch of glitches mixing with the existential crisis heats it up to the level of a sugar rush.
