A KALTBLUT exclusive. Photography by Vittorio Schiavo. Fashion by Salvatore Vignola. Models are Angelica and Stella Mazzei at URBN Milan. Make up by Serena Congiu. Wigs by Lilly Love.
1994 was a crucial year for Salvatore Vignola, a three-year-old child with a fervent imagination and boundless curiosity. A year marked by different events and coincidences that brought him to grieve to the sea abysses and its inhabitants sees by the eyes of a young creative mind.
It was the year when Vignola learned how to swim with his eyes open, looking for mermaids, imagining enormous castles of stones and shells, long pink hair and fantastic bright tails. Moved by the passion for the sea, he asked his father an aquarium with plants and exotic fishes, that he used to admire for hours.
Everything around Salvatore brought him to the sea, and through the TV he discovered what was happening in the world: it was the year of the swimming world ones in Rome, the year when the Channel Tunnel was inaugurated – the tunnel with the longest submarine route of the world – between France and England, where Domenico Modugno died, an Italian artist that sang “Delfini” with his son Massimo in 1993, that tells a love story between a dolphin and a mermaid.
In the 1994 Matthew Barney presented “Cremaster 4”, a complex artwork that weaves art, cinema, video games and performance art, focus on the Cremaster Cycle, a reflection regarding sexuality and indeterminateness of the humankind, told via symbolism and mythology with the amazing shoot and impeccable screen-plays. The movie was made on Man’s island, in Great Britain, land of the artist and place wherein 1961 was given the last money reward to who was able to find a mermaid or the concrete proof of its existence.
“25 years ago” is a homage to the sea, an invitation to protect and respect it, remembering that from our choices it depends on the fate of whole ecosystems. It’s a callback to the responsibility toward the environment, whose destruction will provoke within 2100 a raising of the waters than at least 65 centimetres.