Saints Daemons

KALTBLUT presents Saints Daemons! Photography and text by Gio Blonde. “I’m Gio Blonde from Italy (Romagna Coast) Psychologist, performer, photographer (only film photo) and anti-model. Born warrior and free. I become the Goddess of Truth in my second life. Photography was a “call”, as I like to define the passage from a sort of coma state to a rebirth and awareness through the first self-portraits. Curator of the artistic project Wildromagna through photographic calls, laboratories and Workshops has brought together various artists. I begin to shoot at night between baths and raves to then arrive at the nude as the language of truth. I begin my performances and through the Blindsessions, inspired by my blind mother, photographer, I understand that the camera is only a means and it is through the exchange of energy, heart and skin that transformation can be created. To date, my performances are carried out during the photographic workshops that I hold in Italy but also in other European countries.

At night everybody becomes a verb with which I mix, I offer myself and I transform myself. Every relationship is a Matrix.

Every photograph is a trauma. Without trauma, there is no evolution. Without evolution, there is no Love. I provoke the other with my character and my progressive nakedness to lead my relationship. The other can follow me or oppose me. I recognize myself in every mirror of every bathroom. In every encounter/clash: the lovers, those never seen again, those unaware of my second life, those met by chance… but above all those who are part of my Matrix.”

“I believe I glimpsed under the sun splendours that eclipse the sun and the very lights of the saints when each figure was transformed into the icon of an exasperated paradise…, and mysterious glimmers rose in the flame. Then the heart competed with the objectlessness of the infinite, the delight of a divine solitude surpassed the absence of limits of divinity… (E. Cioran, Divagazioni).
My mother repeated to me like a fable “The Myth of Er” by Platone, that before being born the soul of each of us chooses a design that we will then live on earth, and receives a sort of guide/companion, a daemon, who it is unique to each of us. But once we are born we forget all this and believe we came away empty.

It is the daimon who reminds us of the content of our image, he is therefore the bearer of our destiny. The word dáimōn originates from Greek and means divine messenger, the guiding spirit who is in a sort of middle ground, the same in which the soul resides, and acts as an intermediary between God and man. For Aristotle, the daemon symbolized virtue and wisdom, the most enlightened essence of the human being, within which one’s potential is hidden. It was always my mother who gave me every smell of sacredness. And this created between me and her (and between me and my Matrix) a particular, almost blessed bond, which I carry within and still seek.

When I say “there is no photography without trauma” it is a bit like this I believe: it is my rebirthing that I try to relive with photography: every lack, every love, every mourning. Fear and desire. If I think about the rooms in G.’s house, they are imbued with sacredness: Madonnas, crucifixes, rosaries, candles, paintings, and sacred books. Every story and every journey created a state of ecstasy in me. And fear. By sacredness I do not mean a spiritual condition, I am referring to potencies and powers that man feels he has as superior to himself, and therefore they are, as it were, other and beyond human ones. My mother had them. I have it, when I photograph equally divine subjects. Like my Daemons. I have always feared the sacred as I have always been attracted to it. It creates a sort of ecstasy in me, I forget every other thought; produces a state of true bliss. Every Madonna encountered. Every daemon was photographed. It’s the only way I know (so far) to remember my mother, to feel her. And give gratitude to this scar of infinite nostalgia.”