Weights, poles, masks and naked drawings are a celebration of individuality in the eyes of Italian artist Marco Cassani.

Italian artist Marco Cassani’s latest exhibition, “Indisciplinato”, is a statement of individual liberation from what he sees as manipulation by society and corporations.

The exhibition, which runs until June 24 at the Office For Contemporary Art (OFCA) International building in Yogyakarta, displays a number of installation works, largely constructed from tools and materials that the artist personally purchased from workers and residents in Bali, his home for the past six years.

Some of the exhibited works include a number of weights made from plastic, cement or metal by Javanese builders who have gone to Bali to work on construction projects. There are also two poles consisting of thousands of Rp 100 (75 US cents) and Rp 200 coins piled up on top of one another and a number of self-made masks, which he acquired from a man considered insane by his community in Bali.

“I am very interested in the human being and as a human being, we are watered where we live. Water is surrounding us and it shapes us,” Cassani said, explaining to The Jakarta Post the ideas behind his works at a recent interview at the Italian Cultural Institute in Jakarta.

“I began to become very interested in the tools and in how society manipulates us in some ways, both politically and economically, as an individual. It is very difficult to find out what you are because of this,” he added.

Born in Milan in 1981, Cassani said that it took a long process for a person to find out what he or she really was, as most people were shaped according to the demands of society.

The mask: Artist Marco Cassani bought this mask from a man who is considered to be crazy by fellow Balinese.

This process of manipulating an individual to become a mere product of a society’s fabricated ideals has worsened with the fact that corporations also want to take advantage of this loss of individuality, he added.

“So for this work, I took the same strategies as corporations in a different way. If the corporation tries to repress your individuality and to capitalize on it, I try to avoid this. I try to bring out the things that are parts of you, the things that represent you, but using the strategy of the capitalist system,” he said.

Cassani said “Indisciplinato” had a contextual relation with Indonesian society’s way of life, which he has been absorbing and probing at for the last six years.

“Indonesia is a society that is somehow structured, but in this kind of structure, people try to express themselves in different ways and become very creative,” he said.

As well as “Indisciplinato”, Cassani is also currently working on another project that focuses on the celebration of individuality.

In the project, entitled Encounters, Cassani reflects on the concept of ownership and authorship of objects by reversing ordinary situations and discovering interaction between the unpredictable situations created by him and his subjects, whom he chooses as they are engaged in work.  

Through this project, Cassani aims to collect new products created by these interactions, giving a new perspective on the concept of labor and modes of production in the capitalist system.

In Les Demoiselles d’Orient, the first batch of the Encounters project, which was conducted from 2012 to 2014, Cassani studied Asian sex workers.

In this work, Cassani used the observation of exotic culture as the starting point. Under his observation, he gave prostitution a new perspective by reversing the ordinary situation of the prostitutes’ work routine into a new labor by inviting them to draw him naked.

Through interaction with the sex workers, Cassani produced drawings that portrayed him as an object but in reality, each portrait of his was actually the individual representation of the sex worker who painted him.

“When I came to Asia, I saw prostitution as a really hidden form within society. For me it has a very, very strong relationship with the daily lives of people here,”

Weighs: Among the tools that Marco Cassani displays in the Indisciplinato exhibition are sets of weights made by Javanese workers who go to Bali to construct buildings.

“So, I became interested in this job and I made several explorations and I worked for two years — in Bali, Surabaya, Bangkok and Phnom Penh. My goal was to capture the individuality of this women who work in the sex industry,” he said

“I tried to think how I could keep the relationship between them and their bodies, because in their work, the body is a very easy tool to use but at the same time, they need to keep the distance between their bodies and their clients,” he added.

— Photos Courtesy of Marco Cassani