Our world of the 2020s is a mysti-fica-tion.
The human being of the twenties has been stripped of the soul, of the mystical drive towards the search for truth; in this context even the role of the artist appears wholly useless, puerile, naïve.
No inner search is needed if the only possible elevation can take place outside and from the outside, if truth exists only as the sum of mystifications, appearances and surrogates.
Humanity's relationship with sex undergoes the general social and cultural shift now under way in every sphere: the swift passage from life to the fiction of life.
From living beings we mutate towards the condition of appearing to be such without necessarily being so. We put on make-up, we have surgery, we represent ourselves and share ourselves as images of a living being, to the point of imagining that we might transfer our being, at our death or even before, into a machine made in our likeness.
Within this picture, pornography has replaced sexuality with the aim of creating a perfect surrogate of the sexual act, eliminating the act itself through the disintermediation of the other, replaced by monitors, headsets, erotic toys, dolls, robots and technological gadgets.
Contact with another human being is experienced as potentially dangerous, contagious; the satisfaction of our primary drives must take place without risks, consequences or guilt, interfacing with a machine that has no consciousness, that cannot choose, nor suffer, nor do us harm.
We have sex with a puppet, an automaton, a fetish that we build to our own taste, choosing colours and sizes, drawing on erotic fantasies borrowed from pornographic films - a machine to which we believe we have given an artificial intelligence better than our own.
We constantly invent a game in which we pretend to be with someone who loves us; we substitute sex and love, knowing that they are no longer necessary for procreation.
The pleasure of the sexual act shifts ever further from the pelvis to the head. We are potentially able to enact any fantasy in the theatre of our libido; we can have sex with the whole world, with images, objects, flowers, dolls.
Sex toys, although widely used, remain hidden objects - perhaps among the last taboos left in this field. They are made with materials, shapes and colours that more or less deliberately recall children's toys; they look as though they came out of Hello Kitty's country. They are the toys grown-ups use in order to try to feel something still.
Pornography is accessible to everyone and has become the only source of information about sex for the younger generations; minors are a new market for pornography, sex toys and plastic surgery.
The human species is no longer portrayed as characterised by being men and women, but by individuals whose sexual identity, and body in general, is a spectrum of shifting genders that one may approach at will, through practices, hormone therapies and surgical operations designed to make us appear as what we "feel we are".
What matters is not what we are, but how we want others to see us, to imagine us.
In Pixar's Toy Story, the toys come to life in the absence of Andy, their owner, weaving relationships of friendship, love and hatred among themselves. In the bedroom of a fluid pre-adolescent of today, toys and sex toys are mixed together: the dolls walk through forests of vibrators, massagers, cock rings, artificial vaginas and dildos, like astronauts on an unknown planet searching for the lost road that leads to their owners' sexual identity.
It is in this landscape that I have set the subjects of this series, as toys among toys, about to give one another pleasure.
Hello Kitty was created in Tokyo by the designer Yuko Shimizu in 1974; the merchandising, licensed and otherwise, turns over a billion dollars a year - from stationery to aeroplanes, from toys to clothes, condoms, vodka, underwear and even vibrators.
To an Italian who does not know German well, "Kitty die Kätzchen" (Kitty the kitten) sounds ironically like "Kitty il cazzo" (Kitty the prick), or, in Roman dialect, "Chittesencula".


How porn educates our children (in Italian)
Hello Kitty turns 50: how she built an 80-million-dollar empire (in Italian)