ARCADIA

_2018-2021

Stefano Filipponi, stage name Arcadia, is an Italian songwriter, illustrator and performer artist.
The project investigates, through an existential study, the stratified identity of Stefano and Arcadia. Created from 2018 to 2021, ARCADIA was born from an engaging and truthful human and artistic exchange between the author and the protagonist.
The Arcadia persona was born to facilitate Stefano’s performances on stage. As Stefano narrates, Arcadia was born during a Stendhal attack: he was literally mesmerized by a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Veronica Veronese: same red hair and same deep melancholy. Furthermore, poetry is a major inspiration in Stefano’s artistic performance. The Italian Arcadia Academy has historically found its literature expression and essence in the return to a bucolic way of living, where life is perceived as a peaceful and pastoral dimension where humans could reconnect with themselves, simultaneously in contraposition to the splendor of the Baroque era. In the same way, Arcadia represents Stefano’s inner place, where he is free to be himself and wear his own mask. By becoming his own super hero, he breaks free from his weaknesses and transforms into the elegant creature who lives in a beautiful world made of art, freedom, music and fantasy.
The profound knowledge of the fascinating and complex dimension that lives inside Stefano, has seen the revelation of an incandescent and polyedric spirit, in which the Feminine and the Masculine, and what there is in between and beyond them, theatrically and sensibly intertwine with each other: these essences give life to tolerance, diversity, self-determination, solidarity and the importance of vulnerability as a peculiar human characteristic.
ARCADIA is all about the celebration of the Inner-Light, empathy, kindness and the braveness of being oneself.

The project is an artistic collaboration between the author and Stefano; it's composed by a collection of travel memoires from Tokyo, visited by him in 2019. The Japanese news clippings, posters and stickers are all unique pieces, a sparkling background for photographs portraying the icons of art history beauties in juxtaposition to the characters of Japanese animēshon pop culture. Through the exploration of these theoretical and aesthetic liaisons, ARCADIA celebrates a culturally intersecting queer-Camp Universe.
The final intent is to place Stefano and Arcadia in the heart of this segmented and diversified collage, where they are illustrated as a performing icon free from any identity definition. They are the King, they are the Queen reigning in this kawaii macrocosm, halfway between theatricality, sequins and reality.

Exhibited at
InSight Foto Festival 2021 at Sala Nicolini, Varese
Prix Picto de la Photographie de Mode 2020 by Picto Foundation at Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de Paris
Iper Esterno/Interno - BraeraKlasse#5 at CAREOF Milano during Walk-In Studio

Published on
PERIMETRO
Rolling Stones Italia - BLACK CAMERA
ARTCONNECT Magazine - Mixed Media: The Constructed Self