BECAUSE THE NIGHT:
PIPPI LANGSTRUMPF VS CHIARA FUMAI;
INTERVIEW WITH MARCELLO BELLAN
Chiara Fumai approached the music scene in 2003 while taking her first steps within the creative landscape of Milan. She first worked as art director for the Lobby Night at Rocket—an underground club whose international program would mark a generation—before starting her career as a DJ under the pseudonym of Pippi Langstrumpf, and finally, in 2008, founding the record label Dischi Bellini with Elisa Colonna. She was still fully active in the world of music when she began to produce her first art works in 2007, taking care to keep the two areas separate. In 2009, Fumai decided to devote herself entirely to the visual arts.
The following interview highlights how certain aspects of Fumai’s creative practice, first developed in music, passed into and became a founding element of her art: this includes the histrionic component of her performances and her passion for staging; her eclectic interests and ability to choose and combine different things, transforming them through editing; her care for all aspects of the production process; her desire to highlight female figures.
This early stage in her career, which has often been overshadowed in readings of her work, is described here by Marcello Bellan. An unconventional organizer in the electronic and dance music scenes of the early 2000s, Bellan was Chiara’s partner at the time and her collaborator in the artistic direction of the Lobby club nights at the Rocket.
Cristiana Perrella: How did you meet Chiara?
Marcello Bellan: We met through mutual friends who were involved in music: Luca Baldini, a DJ-producer from Milan who worked a lot in Turin, and Sergio Ricciardone, the artistic director of the international festival Club2Club. They ran the Drama Society project together. Chiara might have already come to some of my club nights. There was a slight age difference between us—I was born in ‘73, Chiara in ‘78—and I had already been in the world of music, electronic music in particular, for three or four years, working in Milan but also in Bologna, where I’ve always had a connection with Link. In Milan, there was no equivalent of Link, as a creative and productive space.
CP: Wasn’t Chiara too young to attend the Link and that circle?
MB: Yes, indeed, the Link generation was the one preceding hers. But Distorsonie, the first festival of electronic dance music, where Andrea Lissoni was a collaborator and which took place in the historic Link venue in via Fioravanti from 1994 to 2004, was a landmark event for young people, too.
CP: Another important festival in those years was Netmage—produced and curated by Xing, a cultural organization that had absorbed some of Link’s creative energies—which was also a very important space of knowledge, exchange and interaction for a generation that moved between art and music. Chiara participated in Netmage 11—was that festival for her, too, a vehicle for new relationships, including work relationships, at the convergence between art and music?
MB: In those early years of her career, Chiara was really “intimist” and only rarely, very rarely, social. She never went to other people’s events, at least until 2007 or 2008, and probably even later. Her way of approaching things was through a screen: she could very well write to someone she didn’t know and tell them that she appreciated their work, but she would never go and shake their hand saying “you’re good, I like what you do.” She came to Link a few times, but I used to go there alone even when we were together. She was much more fond of distance. Then over time she softened, for sure, but she was always very focused on herself; she wasn’t the public-relations or exchange-of-ideas type. Anything that has to do with meeting for dinner, or going out after the show, getting to know each other a little better—she would gladly skip it.
If you look at the various music scenes that were emerging in Italy during that period, Chiara certainly moved in a very individual way. She preferred to build something of her own in Milan rather than join the existing scene—which, I must say, was falling a bit into decline. In the years when I started, there was a lot of interaction between the world of clubs, such as the Plastic, and the more alternative world of social centers. You could find a DJ from the Adriatic Riviera, but there was also a house room, where it was like being at the Echoes in Riccione; there were people who dressed differently, who had different tastes, but they were fine in the same place, though maybe in different rooms. This happened at the Link, too:
I remember the house nights on Wednesdays whose audience would never have attended other events at the Link. When Chiara arrived, this exchange, these intersections, were already gone, so she went her own way. She definitely had a passion for dance music, for whatever has to do with rhythm, movement, even dancing (maybe a little unevenly). She never liked house—that is, music made just for dancing. But music that had a certain rhythm, with a strong beat, that she liked. Her spirit could be described as “burlesque.” She adored Luigi Ontani—irony, disguise. Everything she did in music was a reflection of a surrealist, parodistic vision of things. That’s why she liked Italo disco. She liked it, but she also made fun of the real legends of the 80s. I remember that Alexander Robotnik came to one of our nights at Rocket and she partly respected his authority, but she also teased him. The press releases she wrote for the Lobby Night at Rocket were always very ironic. She was against taking yourself too seriously,
especially in our field. She put her heart into what she did but she always managed to find an ironic, burlesque note.
CP: When I talked to Guido Costa, the Turin gallery owner Chiara was working with for her last exhibition—and who knew her from her first artistic performance in Guarene, Chiara Fumai Presents Nico Fumai, of which the Turin exhibition was a “remix”—he told me about the way she worked on the project, and he emphasized her desire to dispel the aura of esotericism, of radical feminism, that surrounded her work. She wanted to recapture an element of play and irony, bringing out her more instinctive nature and a certain “straying” attitude that she had been able to embrace in music…
MB: I agree, there was little intellectualization in music. For Chiara, the transition from music to art was very fluid. The focus on the visual
element was always strong for her, even in the musical field. She was interested in being the artistic director of the evenings, not only in playing. She wanted to use her own images for communication—she worked on a computer at the time, in a very manga-like style, but she also liked to draw—and even for international guests, sometimes even quite important ones, the visual part was always hers.
CP: What kind of images did you use besides drawings?
MB: They were very cinematic. For example, Adriano Canzian—a DJ and producer who often came to Lobby, the first Italian to publish with the legendary German label Internationale Deejay Gigolo Records—worked on pornography. It was 2003/04, the era of electro-clash, and there was this return to collage elements in electronic music. It wasn’t really an abstract thing, but a very concrete one. Lobby was really about cutting and pasting, about stolen images, rather than the classic drawn VJing.
CP: So, let’s talk about Lobby: Rocket, Milan, early 2000s. How did you start? It was a club night that you organized together, right?
MB: We were together with a third girl, Kiara Andres, also a DJ, for two nights a month, two Thursdays. Usually, one night would feature an international guest and on the other we would play the music ourselves. It started out as a women’s thing, mostly: there was Chiara, the other Kiara and I was in charge of the more logistical/organizational part. I had already brought some international music to Italy and I had some connections, so it was easier for me to try to convince the musicians to come to a very small venue. Rocket was really more of a bar than a club, it would get crowded and there would be up to 500 people on top of each other. It’s a place that worked even though it was small, even in its sweat, like a cave, a subsoil. I took care of all the hard work and they had the fun part.
CP: So, Chiara chose the guests and then DJed with the others on the second evening, as well as taking care of the art direction. How did she start playing?
MB: Very sparingly. She began to feel confident around 2004. There’s always some fear of making mistakes when you go into the booth, so Rocket was also her studio, a place where she had the opportunity to rehearse numerous times—first for a quarter of an hour, then twenty minutes, then she’d pick up again, then stop, then play an evening, then move on to another one. So, very freely.
CP: And what was the field where she took her first steps? What kind of music did she play?
MB: It was more electro-techno, and she loved the early rave sound. The electro-disco was a later addition. At the beginning, her references were Drexciya, the classic Detroit techno, and, among the Italians, Lory D.
CP: So, musically, she moved between two quite distant poles: on the one hand the irony of Italo disco and on the other the slightly darker side of techno, which she probably arrived at from her early interest in the post-punk scene. How do you combine these two preferences—what is the cultural breeding ground where both can develop? Did she follow a path of her own or did she fit into a broader context?
MB: The scene that revisited traditional Italo disco in the 90s and early 2000s almost always did it in this harder, more Nordic way. The various Dutch labels and artists that were pretty much at the center of this revival—Clone Classic Cuts, I-F (Interr-Ference), which Chiara was following and which are still around—did it in this very dark key, and the same thing also happened in France. The original Italo disco was sunny and closer to the disco of the 70s, but it was revisited in a more techno key. So Chiara’s path was part of a general wave. The element that got picked up was the dirty and punky one of Krisma and Baldelli, rather than the Riccione club one. Also, the various protagonists of the Roman scene, Marco Passarani or Francisco, have always been 130-beats-per-minute DJs—they played fast music, not 80 or 90 bpm music. Their music travels to the rhythms of techno. Because darkness is also made of speed and frequencies, so really big, heavy beats. Then the melodies were also recovered, a certain playfulness of Italo disco, maybe the samples, but it was a fairly substantial restyling. In Italy, Francisco is still working along those lines, between irony and groove, though he may be a bit more cinematic now. But yes, Chiara certainly had two souls, two fields of interest, so she was absolutely fine riding both horses, and she could move from one to the other quite easily. This takes skill.
CP: A skill that was also transferred to her artistic practice, which was very much influenced by her career as a DJ—particularly in terms of her ability to choose and assemble very different things, recontextualize them, give them a different rhythm. But it’s occurred to me that another element may have been transposed from music to art: I suspect that Italo disco may have also provided a starting point for the theme of identity, aliases and incarnations, which later characterized her performances. In her artistic practice, Chiara is always inhabited, as it were, by different entities, becoming their vehicle and speaking through them at the same time. In the original Italo disco, it was common for professional singers to lend their voices to image-characters who appeared on album covers and performed in playback on television or in discos. The same singer could be behind different projects, while the bodies of others became the visible medium, the public identity, of their voice. I thought that, for Chiara, the idea of a body giving voice to other presences could have partly originated there. Do you think there’s some truth to that?
MB: I believe that music was not a fleeting moment in Chiara’s journey, but a founding one—so it makes sense that certain modes of expression originated in that context and then took on greater presence and strength in her art. Her background was in music and she continued to have musical interests at least until 2011. And in any case, she never stopped listening to new things, buying records, following labels. In my opinion, her interest in Italo disco is key to her vision of staging, where there’s a frontal aspect and a hidden one, with the hidden aspect always referring back to a past that returns—initially in a burlesque way—or to the re-enactment of someone else’s life. In this sense, she was like a sort of puppeteer. The lives are sometimes invented, as in the case of Nico Fumai, the mythical, eclectic Italo disco musician who took the name and identity of Chiara’s father. This figure was only partly invented, though, because there were still many references to the real life of her father. Nicola Fumai might not have been a full-time gigolo, or a full-time musician, like the character she described, but alongside the invented part there was also a lot of reality. Her father really would have liked to sing, he really did have artistic ambitions, but his album was never made. She imagined and staged it.
Then, by putting herself in the shoes of historical feminist figures, Chiara undoubtedly took another leap: she started working on a different mode of performance, no longer as a puppeteer but as a body on stage—and this was a big change, there was definitely a gap between the first and second phase. Aside from the characters she chose, who were certainly less burlesque, it was also her staging that began to assume a greater responsibility and seriousness.
CP: I want to pause on this issue of the characters and feminism. Earlier, you talked about Lobby Night as a very feminine project, and Chiara was also part of female:pressure, a database of DJs and producers that promotes female involvement in the electronic music scene, founded by Electric Indigo (Susanne Kirchmayr). So I was wondering: was feminism, which was such a key element in her artistic practice, just as important in the musical field? The world of electronic music has always been rather masculine, if not entirely male chauvinist…
MB: Yes it is, or it was—I don’t follow the scene so much anymore. Maybe it has changed, but yes, it is male chauvinist for the most part, if only because male figures are always the protagonists. I don’t know why; maybe it has to do with their relationship with technology. But in the French scene, for example, there were many women, like at Le Pulp, that club in Paris that set the trend for some years with its Kill the DJ nights. Anyway, Chiara used to tease me that I was their Ivan Smagghe.
CP: But could this attempt by Chiara to unite the female front, to bring together more women in a world that was predominantly male, be understood as a form of activism?
MB: Let’s say that it was a practiced, but not yet theorized, activism. At the time, she was not yet familiar with feminist texts, but she was interested in the idea of forming a female community, though not in an oppositional or excluding way. Her attitude was more like “we can do it too, we can do it,” rather than “let’s take positions away from men.” She was really at peace with that. She liked the idea of organizing, of pulling the strings at a club night project run by women. I remember that when we went to Beijing together in 2006, for I’mPULSE, an international workshop for emerging DJs from Europe and Asia, it was mostly women who were invited. I was actually there as a journalist; in fact, I wrote an article afterwards.
CP: Was that when Chiara wrote a diary for Pig Mag?
MB: Yes. And that was an important moment for her because it was a two-week workshop—I think it was the first moment of international exchange she participated in, with people coming from different parts of the world, organized by an Asian association. And it was a nice experience because she hadn’t yet had the chance to test herself in big venues, she’d never played records in front of a thousand people: the first time that happened was in China, at the Tango. It was there that she started using the pseudonym Pippi Langstrumpf; before, at Rocket, she called herself Dja-vù. In Beijing, she felt immediately at ease. She was fascinated by the Far East, Korea, China, Japan. It also gave her a lot of confidence—you know, going to a club where the booth is up there and everyone sees you is very different from being in a quiet bar.
CP: Indeed, the diary suggests that she was enthusiastic about the experience, and also very curious to deepen her knowledge of the local music scene. Was her curiosity oriented in a specific direction or was it an omnivorous appetite to discover new scenes? For instance, she brought Suomi Techno to Milan…
MB: The leading thread is her interest in Italo disco, a transversal interest whereby you can have a group in Finland, and one in New Zealand… In 2007, they organized a reunion of the glories of Italo disco somewhere near Mantua, and there was a bit of everything. I didn’t go, but she did.
CP: Speaking of cultural context, what do you think were Chiara’s most significant encounters in those years, and what was it that marked her musical journey and beyond? Were there important figures?
MB: What was important, although brief, was her experience in the world of design and architecture, despite the fact that she abandoned it after graduation. The work she did at Tanja Solci’s Segheria, where she worked in public relations, allowed her to get to know Dutch designers such as Maarten Baas, Richard Hutten, Droog Design—they were all there at Segheria, and they were quite eclectic people. That openness and horizontality really resonated with her.
And then we certainly got to know a few music figures together who influenced her—Francisco was very important, someone she referred to; they wrote to each other a lot. Francisco and Passarani, who both had a certain ability to be out of fashion, evergreen, not interested in the trend of the moment but always true to their own interests, their own moral evolution, so to speak. Then Robotnik, Tuscan, Florentine, Bottin, who was younger, another unique personality in the club scene in Italy. And foreigners such as the French Dirty Sound System, who were also art directors, maybe not innovators, but they had a huge musical culture and an equally large music archive, they were able to put together beautiful compilations—part of the Parisian Kitsuné crowd, but much less dance, more rock, very eclectic. Chiara wasn’t so eclectic in her DJ sets because moving back and forth like that between genres takes years and years of experience, even just from a technical point of view. But this was a quality that impressed her.
CP: Were there relationships with the Roman scene? Aside from references like Lory D. Was Dissonanze one of the festivals Chiara attended?
MB: Again: in terms of contacts, no. I went a few times, but she never came. She always followed the program, though, even from a distance. But she didn’t feel like moving. She always had a great interest in it, but remotely. The same goes for Club2Club. There was a bit of reluctance in her—she liked the idea of either being the protagonist or not being there at all and having others tell her about it.
CP: In 2008, Chiara, together with Elisa Colonna, founded her own record label called Dischi Bellini, which released a compilation album called The Church of Pippi Langstrumpf (with a cover made by Chiara). Damir Ivic wrote an enthusiastic review of this album in Mucchio
Selvaggio: “This is not an LP by a single artist but a collection, and you know that we tend to skimp on reviews of those, since the world is now full of collections and mix CDs produced at almost unsustainable levels, especially considering that collections and mix CDs themselves are useless, devoid of personality and of any particular interest. That is, in ninety percent of cases. Here, instead, the series of tracks assembled by Chiara Fumai (the real name of Pippi Langstrumpf) provides a vivid, vibrant and very current portrait of the nu disco scene. The nu is important, because what we have here is not calligraphic nostalgia: on the contrary, the sound material in all the tracks is re-synchronized to the new millennium, although the references and tributes to (Italo) disco remain explicit. The result: everything is very pleasing to listen to. Highly recommended. Much better than virtually all the nu/ital/etc. material in circulation for the past few years.”
What was the path that led her to create Dischi Bellini, an already post-Italo project that aimed more at capturing the sounds of nu disco than at a revival?
MB: To tell you the truth, I don’t know much about Dischi Bellini. We were still dating, but I don’t remember how it came about. I just remember that it was an evolution of Don’t Cut Spaghetti, Elisa Colonna’s label.
CP: Let’s go back to Nico Fumai, who is the alpha and omega of Chiara’s
artistic journey and the junction between music and art. You were there when that project came about, at the moment when Chiara’s work went in a more explicitly art-oriented direction. What was the need that led to this transition?
MB: The transition took place in total continuity. Chiara didn’t like going to exhibitions—the world of contemporary art was not a reference for her. Design was certainly more so, but even that only interested her up to a point. I don’t mean that it happened by chance, but it certainly wasn’t her precise goal, her ambition. She didn’t aspire to be an artist so much as an art director, the deus ex machina behind a fashion show or someone else’s exhibition, a concert or a club night. She liked the idea of controlling the whole process, creating an event from A to Z. When she got invited to exhibit at Careof in 2008, it was an incentive for her to produce something ad hoc. She had already made a video in Greece—I’m a Junkie, a sort of music video in which she played a Greek singer from the 1930s, Roza Eskenazi, in lip-synch—and the works with the paper dolls, Me and Cotton Lily, which had been exhibited at the Conduit gallery in London. But an exhibition was something different, it needed more effort, there were two rooms. She did it with the aim of speaking to the world of music, to her Italo disco audience, more than to the art public. Chiara Fumai Presents Nico Fumai was a story that developed through fragments, through photos. A bit of a spy story: where has Fumai ended up, where has he been all these years? It was the story of a once famous, now forgotten man, which was pretty much the typical story of the protagonists of Italo disco, who did not become superstars but were always on the verge of doing so. Someone who was an archaeologist had to come along in order to give them back their life.
CP: After Nico Fumai, where the somewhat playful, parodistic tone is still clearly readable, Chiara moved on to other atmospheres, abandoning all explicit references to the world of music. How did this further passage come about?
MB: At that point, our ways had already parted, even though I kept visiting her exhibitions. I didn’t agree with the path she was going down; she had started to take an interest in magicians, in esotericism, which struck me as far from her nature. At first, she hung around with magicians who were clowns, charlatans, at best cheap conjurers of the sort that might perform in nightclubs, and she was aware of that. I remember she came to my studio once with a guy from Bari, I don’t know where she got him. That was when we grew distant: she was convinced this was the right way and so she kept going—and being a very radical person, she cut ties. Afterwards, she also began moving around a lot, and it became difficult to see her. From 2009 onward, she did residencies everywhere.