Marco Raparelli
Fukt Magazine: Your drawings and animations very often have a humorous approach, showing everyday scenes, people and situations with surreal elements.
At the same time one also can find a dark undertone. How important are those aspects in your work?
Marco Raparelli: The drawings mirror the imperfection of the characters that I portray, the same physical and mental improvisations. For this reason my drawings sometimes are funny and dark at the same time, I’m like a television transmitter.
I utilize a style that reflects chance and liberty where gestures and markings are fundamental. And I willingly accept mistakes as the basic precondition of the human condition.
Fukt Magazine: How is your process when you work with animation, do you always start with a finished storyline?
Marco Raparelli: I never use a storyboard for my animation, my animations are born from a specific drawing or from specific images. Around these drafts I build a possible circle of a story in which these images may be just a part.
I describe micro-worlds where the banality of everyday life is continuously mixed with its surreal dimension. Seen from this perspective my animations are grotesque and ironic, but for me at the same time they are very dramatic.
Fukt Magazine: Now and then you also publish books of your different art projects. Can you tell me in brief about your new book?
Marco Raparelli: My books are published by Cura.Books and the new title is Permafrost.
The chapters range from a review of etiquette “Etiquette of Good Manner”, made up of characters that promptly do the opposite of what should be done, to the brilliant “Let’s Talk about Art” chapter where I took an ironic view on all trades and roles that exist in the micro-world of contemporary art by even trying to talk with the layman. The last chapter “Experiment” stems from a true story. This is an
experiment conducted by the U.S. military in the ’50s, examining the somatic and psychological impact of LSD on being human.
I use this title because the book contains different chapters (heterogeneous among one another). (In geology, permafrost or cryotic soil is soil remaining at or below the freezing point of water 0°C (32°F) for two or more years.)
The permafrost holds together the cracks of the mountains at high altitude, and when it melts there is a risk of landslides.
So the title is a pretest to put together these heterogeneous chapters that at the same time become homogeneous thanks to the use of the drawing as part of a single narrative.
*Fukt Magazine is a periodical published by Björn Hegardt