Sofia Anna Ginevra Giannì, aka SAGG Napolitook up archery at a time in her life when she wasn’t sure what her next move would be. A moment of stalemate. He wanted to learn the discipline and perseverance behind a sport in order to translate it into artistic and creative activity. Then he ended up being so passionate about it that he decided to start from it and transform it into a work of art. Her reflection begins from the relationship that femininity has with sport: everything that is feminine in physical activity is nothing but an obstacle, long hair, make-up, let alone long and decorated nails like hers, and then the breasts, which is why it is said that Amazons cut them off when they were very young. When she shoots arrows she often does so with her hair loose, her nails long with a manicure often done by some artist (she collaborated with the nail artist Sylvie MacMillan for a Vogue Italia project) and her jewels. She finds the idea of having to give up part of her femininity more cumbersome and annoying than showing it off. “May the building of a strong mind and a strong body be the greatest work I have ever made”, is one of the sentences we read on the tunnel in which the artist performed and shot the arrows. “I get obsessed looking at the way people move when they’re doing something they’re really good at,” we read on the other side. The performance took the name of With heart in one hand and bow in the othera reflection on the female warrior and fighting spirit, which does not separate but unites.
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How SAGG Napoli was born
Before the stalemate and before archery, SAGG Napoli, an artist born in ’91, made herself known thanks to a series of performance e video in which, by cultivating an image of a strong and non-conformist Southern woman, the objective is to identify and translate into art the most authentic aesthetic codes of the Southern tradition, with the aim of making them more easily intelligible to a non-native audience and, at at the same time, give them dignity. «From music to art, architecture and fashion, in the South we tend to admire and imitate the cultural productivity of the North, forgetting that it is often the South itself that inspires, if not even first generates, certain ideas aesthetics”, he told us in a 2021 interview, in the issue we dedicated to the Neapolitan city. Also worth mentioning is the choreography he composed in 2015 for scooters, the preferred means of transport par excellence for Neapolitan kids, for the performance SAGG Demonstration which was held in the Quartieri Spagnoli. Then in 2017 came the videos are Instagram filmed in Naples which, between memes and reality, touched on themes such as liberation of the body and the female sexuality. At the center there is always aexploration that starts from the bodythe expectations to which he is subjected and the culture he is expected to inhabit.
