When Bogotá photographer Sebastián Pii tried to explain to his family why he chose to photograph naked bodies rather than weddings or baptisms, he defended his work as if citing a manifesto. “Photography is the morphology of a product,” he told them. “Photography is a narrative, it’s a message, it’s a concept.” But the interesting thing is that he’s the product, he’s the narrative, he’s the message, he’s the concept. Sebastián Pii has been showing off his own body naked in front of the camera for 10 years. And it is her self-represented body, more than her photographic lens, the canvas she has chosen to convey a message about the wounds we bear on our skin.
“I used my body as a conceptual language,” explains Pii El PAÍS one morning from his photo studio in the south of the capital, which he set up on the roof above his parents’ apartment. Sebastián Pii is his stage name now, but he was born Sebastián Castillo 29 years ago and was one of nearly 150 people in the world reported with a rare genetic condition called Hallermann-Streiff. This is a condition that causes facial and skull deformities, difficulty gaining weight or height, or strengthening muscle mass, among several symptoms. Pii is a young man with a very thin face and thick glasses who speaks very confidently of his long fingers and “reptilian” back.
Sebastián Pii is the stage name of Sebastián Castillo Sebastián Pii
But what is abnormal or ugly for others was for him a process of resignation from what beauty means. And what was very daring for others – stripping his striking morphology in front of the public – was a therapeutic process for him and for those who learn to observe him.
Sebastián Pii recently showed his naked body on the big screens of Colombian cinemas. He did so as the lead in Entre la Niebla, a moving feature film directed by Augusto Sandino, which premiered earlier this year and won a best cinematography award at the SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas. There, Pii plays “F”, a farmer in the Andes who is about to say goodbye to his ailing father in the midst of a cruel war environment. “It’s a visual poem,” says Pii of this film with more symbols than dialogue, in which the actor threw his naked body into a frozen Andean lagoon.
“When I saw the script and there was no nudity, I said ‘I’m not here,’ there has to be nudity for it to show [en la película] there’s pee,” he explains, speaking of himself in the third person. “Pii is a man who portrays himself, Pii is a man who undresses, and if we do it on the big screen, we’re going to do it with all our might, we’re going to undress that man, and we will.” put him naked in a lagoon, many degrees below zero, because I will not do a project that does not reflect my artistic concept”. It was like this. Pii showed up in front of the Andean moor, ready to strip in front of all of Colombia.
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The birth of an artistic concept
Unsurprisingly, Pii grew up with cruel comments around her. At birth, doctors unknowingly told his parents that their son would not survive more than a few months and that he would be better off in a hospital laboratory. Growing up at school, he would hear comments like, “Don’t touch it because [esa condición genética] it sticks to you”. As he boarded a public bus, he felt the looks and murmurs of those who watched him in surprise.
Pii’s artistic concept emerged ten years ago when she was taking photography classes at a school called Zona Cinco and a teacher asked her students to take nude self-portraits. I wanted the person behind the lens to be able to experience what the person in front of the lens felt like. Pii accepted the challenge of showing her body, but took the exercise almost as therapy: she learned to admit that she didn’t like the shape of her thin feet or the scars on her knees very much, but she liked those of her long pianist hands, the big earlobes, and she thought her look was her real sex appeal.
The classmates didn’t comment as Pii bared her body to them, a heavy blow to the ego. But they did it afterwards, discreetly and secretly: they wanted to tell him they hated their own knees or their hands or their feet. They wanted to tell him that they admired that someone could endure what they would never dare. “I understood that something was going on in their heads,” says Pii. He understood that stripping his body, far removed from the canons of societal beauty, was not therapy just for him.
“It was phototherapy that I wasn’t really aware of,” says Pii. “I realized I wasn’t the only one who healed, that the people who looked at my work healed too…that’s the value of my work when the person shuts up and analyzes themselves and starts to see.” , what not. he likes himself and begins to clash with his morality, with his faith, with his loneliness”. By undressing, Pii became a beauty confessor that managed to target the complexes that viewers carry as crosses and in solitude.
Self-portraits by Colombian photographer Sebastián Pii.Sebastián Pii
In a country like Colombia, which exports pantyhose all over the world, is a world power in plastic surgery and has a saying that there is no paradise without breasts, Pii has found a way to challenge the diversity of bodies, by undressing. It’s somewhat similar to what activists in the body positive movement have done, except that Pii has a genetic condition, which a very small group in the world has. When talking about his credentials, he tends to cite Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen (who merges parts of his naked body with natural landscapes), Spanish photographer Ángela Burón (who does surrealist nudes with her body, which can appear with four hands) and the Mexican painter Frida Khalo, who suffered from polio since childhood and was in such a bad car accident that she painted most of her pictures from her bed, many of these self-portraits reflecting her injuries. “I used to think I was the weirdest person in the world,” Khalo once said. “But then I thought that there are so many people in the world. There has to be someone like me who feels weird and has flaws the same way I do.”
A superpower in galleries
Pii speaks of that “eureka” moment in photography school as the driving force behind his next steps. Eventually, he uploaded his nudes to groups of photographers on Facebook, exhibited in a few galleries, and gradually refined and expanded his portfolio.
For example, he experimented with some nudes in which he photographed his genitals next to two lightbulbs or two fruits or two balloons to talk about his infertility (another Hallermann-Streiff symptom). I wanted to challenge this “concept of macho and macho culture where if someone ‘doesn’t have the balls, they ain’t a man and they don’t cry'” So I gave myself the pleasure of putting on the testicles I want .” Another experiment was to photograph some beautiful models at the moment when they don’t look perfect. “I get people to break their traditional beauty aesthetics to make them real,” she explains. He takes so many photos of them in one sitting and demands so many poses that by the end their faces are full of desperation. “The desperation of being, the desire to return to somewhere stable and comfortable,” says Pii. Desperation to want outside of perfection.
Exhibitions or cinema have made the photographer and actor a person who constantly thinks about beauty. He explains that he chose Pii as his artistic surname in part because this mathematical symbol expresses “the perfection that is imperfect, that is so infinite that it’s never quite perfect, but fits perfectly within the scope.”
Other times, he thinks about beauty when he’s working as a commercial photographer, taking photos of food, families, or products to survive. “My artistic photography is very transgressive, it has no retouching,” says Pii. “The other side [comercial] He’s a perfectionist: perfect skin, an incredible product, the plate neat and well planted that looks divine. I have mastered both techniques, but obviously there is one that nourishes me and another that fills my soul.”
Photographs from his “Pandemic” series.Sebastián Pii
“Beauty doesn’t satiate you with being pretty compared to the canons of beauty established by advertising and society,” she adds. Family, friends, advertising, culture or drug culture have established an ideal of beauty, but Pii wants to break all the rules. “Not all flowers are the same, do you understand me?” asks Pii. “When people don’t realize that a flower doesn’t have to be beautiful, closed and perfect, they feel insecure about their sexuality or their desire to live. And feeling desire should be a right, not an option.”
But perhaps the most transgressive thing about Pii is the attempt to reverse what we try to categorize as normal, like her body; and denormalize what we have normalized, like physical violence or poverty. “It seems unfair to me that they normalize homelessness, they normalize the person on a bridge with a child asking for money,” he says. “I, on the other hand, don’t think that should be a reason for sympathy.”
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