Azione nr. 16 – TATTOOAZIONE
Atelier Montez, Rome – on the occasion of the exhibition Mr Monsters by artist Mirco Campioni, curated by Giancarlo Carpi, the Azione nr. 16 – TATTOOAZIONE took place, a performative action conceived by Gio Montez together with Mirco Campioni himself.
During the performance, Gio Montez was tattooed live on the stage of his atelier, transforming an act usually confined to the intimacy of a tattoo studio — almost a contemporary operating room — into a public spectacle, a performative action shared with the audience.
The operation coherently fits within the artistic research of the Dreaming Barbarians (“Barbari Sognanti”), a poetic and conceptual framework investigated by Gio Montez during this phase of his artistic production. In Azione nr. 16 – TATTOOAZIONE, the tattoo is presented as body-writing: the skin becomes a pictorial surface, a symbolic membrane and an extremely thin boundary between interior and exterior, identity and representation.
Body art thus converges with the now widely commodified practice of contemporary tattooing, dominated by the aesthetics of the final result and by the constant display of the tattooed image as a consumable visual object. In contrast, Gio Montez shifts the focus away from the finished design toward the process of tattooing itself, presenting tattooing as a social ritual, a cultural experience and an identity practice of the contemporary “urban primitive.”
The performance therefore becomes a critical reflection on contemporary artistic languages, distancing itself from the commercial dimension of both art and tattoo culture in order to recover an anthropological, ritualistic and relational dimension of action upon the body.
Through the shared gesture of tattooing and being tattooed, Tattooazione #16 transforms the body into a living performative space, a biological and narrative archive, a symbolic territory crossed by signs, pain, memory and representation.
With this action, Gio Montez and Mirco Campioni continue an experimental research path intertwining performance art, body art and contemporary visual practices, questioning the relationship between spectacle, identity, market dynamics and urban rituality.