In August 2009 I wrote, about this image:

“Today I woke up feeling miserable and with a bad
headache. My body felt tense as if I hadn’t slept all night. I was enraged at
the whole world. I felt incredibly lonely, I desperately needed physical
contact, tenderness, love. I went down to the basement and prepared my photo
studio, even before a cup of tea. I didn’t want these feelings to go away or to
lessen. I wanted to transform them completely into a photograph.

I took my clothes off and started to push out my
rage, by imagining two people I was angry to, and I started to visualize myself
hitting them hard with my fists, first one on my left, then the other one on my
right. In the meantime I listened intensely to check if this emotion felt real
and to find any other strong feeling I needed to express.”

I call this image “The Fury” , like the Furies
or Erinyes in Greek Mythology, supernatural personifications of the anger of
the dead, persecutors of mortal men and women who broke natural laws.

I can see my inner struggle coming out to light. I
can see not one but two swords, as if I were King Aragorn cutting orks’ heads
in the Lord of the Rings –I loved to see those scenes in the movie, and I dreamed
being in his place…

I love my hair making the same shape as my right
arm, both forming a diamond, with my suffering face in the middle. The diamond
could make the rage and the pain precious, a concept Nietzsche knows too well
-“My happiness has wounded me: all sufferers shall be my physicians to me”, and
again “My enemies are too part of my happiness”, and one more “thus I do hunger
for wickedness”.

In my tummy and my left arm I see two scars, with
stitches –which I don’t have-, the wounds of previous battles. One is in the
crease between the arm and the forearm, the place where I used to inject heroin
as a teenager. The other one is just above my belly button, cutting my belly in
half. That’s the region of the hara or guts, where all our energy comes from,
where kids are conceived, nurtured and born. The area where all our passions
and memories are kept, and where creativity comes from.

Using drugs means, to me, searching an epical
quality which we don’t see in normal life. Normality is unbearable for drug
addicts. Think about the name itself: heroin… pure epic. Teenagers need epic.
We all need it, to give meaning to our lives. My daughter Diana says she feels
desperately sad after watching movies like “the Lord of the Rings” or Burton’s
“Alice in Wonderland”, because they are too beautiful and coming back to
normality is very hard. But nothing, no drugs, no fancy cars or movies can
really satisfy this deep need. We must find the epic in our normal life, in the
many struggles and challenges that normal life brings, by making a homage to
our own pain and suffering. By making a journey into ourselves and sharing it
with a wide audience: this is epic.