Mina antiuomo (FLESH!)

If it's not clear it's ok, it doesn't have to be. So, me and Eva had some photographic material we shot inspired by Italian singer and icon Mina (a word that also means explosive mine, bomb), and we titled this series of photos “mina antiuomo, Flesh!” (literally anti-man mine, Flesh!) playing on a double pun: 1 the word mina antiuomo, cause at that time Eva had to get rid of a guy she had a complicated story with, metaphorically killing him to reconnect with herself; and 2 the word flesh, where its phonetic pronunciation, beside its actual meaning, evokes the visual flash of the pictures that produced their strong black and white contrast. We knew it had to be developed as an editorial project, but we didn’t want to wait for magazines or editors to publish it, so we started once again from what we already had. It’s very common in Italian family houses to have a lot of books with cuisine recipes, most of which come from past generations, so they’re very old and no one uses them anymore. We took those as our editorial base and content, and we just covered them using our pictures, to catch the eye of the reader, and fool him. But fool me once, fool me twice, so not only the content inside doesn’t match the cover of the book, but the more the reader goes through the pages with italian recipes, the more they find cards, notes, flyers with printed informations found online about the use of anti-personnel mines in global past and present conflicts, creating a short-circuit in the mind of the reader and in the book itself. Once we had the books, we started placing them in the libraries of different cultural institutions, to use their visibility and accessibility to arrive to a larger public. The last crucial point was writing on the side of the book, where normally there is the synopsis, the instruction for the people who first encountered the book: “I have been planted among these shelves, waiting for you to find me. I exist only if you take me away—unseen. Now. Flesh!”