EVERY ARTIST FOR THEMSELVES

RM’S NON-BINARY DUALITY

BY MARIUCCIA CASADIO

The last few decades of the 20th century left an undeniable mark. They stripped away innocence, cost far too many lives, and permanently changed the lives of countless others, mine included. For some time now, I’ve been wanting to explore and document how massive social wounds like the AIDS crisis and drug addiction have carried over into the present day, reshaping not just how we live, but how we love, how we see ourselves in relationships, how we experience humanity and especially how we make art. If and when I do take on that research, the art collective RM would definitely be part of it. Their work speaks directly to this kind of world: one that’s uncertain, ambiguous, misleading, biased, and full of unspoken fears. It’s a world haunted by viruses, dirty needles, STDs, and even bedbugs. A kind of hellish reality that the two-voice collective RM exposes in all its darkest aspects, with an unmistakable sense of humor and a love for the grotesque. RM is a queer duo made up of Bianca Benenti Oriol and Marco Pezzotta, who’ve been working together since 2015. In the interview that follows, it’s Marco who speaks. He’s always been the more communicative one, and he’s the one who walks me through everything in a long phone conversation, starting with how they came up with their name, and ending with what’s ahead, ten years after the birth of this unique artistic collaboration. The title I chose for this piece. Every Artist for Themselves is almost a manifesto. It comes from a phrase engraved on a double charm: a heart split in two. I’ll end by quoting the duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, who wrote about RM in 2022. They perfectly captured the meaning of that charm: “The most cliché of romantic symbols becomes a metaphor for cynical individualism cryptic in part, and boldly declared in full. Unity makes strength: the strength of fragmentation.” 

What kind of future still awaits us?

MARIUCCIA CASADIO: Let’s start with your name. You began as Real Madrid, but after some legal issues with the soccer club, you changed it to RM. Did you ever think about what else those two letters might stand for? 

RM: For us, it’s just an acronym. Even “Real Madrid” wasn’t meant to last, it started out as a bit of a joke, just a name for a joint exhibition. We never really wanted to label ourselves, and maybe we still don’t. It was never meant to stick. 

So it was more of a placeholder? 

Exactly. We just said, “Why not do something together?” 

And now here you are, ten years later not something that happens every day! How did you meet? 

We studied together in Berlin at the Weissensee Art School, which is in the former East Berlin. When Bianca moved to Geneva and I stayed in Berlin, we started working together seriously. That’s when we settled on using an acronym, partly to blur our real and online identities. We wanted to be harder to pin down. An acronym made it easier to stay untraceable. 

That makes sense searching for RM online isn’t easy. You get MRI scans, or the K-pop rapper from BTS… You really have to know what you’re looking for. But once people engage with your work, the name starts to make sense. It’s mysterious, multifaceted, ambiguous pretty perfect for artists like you who explore secrecy and the act of revealing hidden meanings. 

Totally. Our approach has a lot to do with “secrecy and revelation.” Those two words are kind of our guiding lights. The idea of revealing connects to things like coming out whether it’s about illness or sexuality. 

From there, you’ve built a sort of vocabulary in your work beds and bedbugs, vacuum cleaners, disinfectants, oxygen tanks, even Cupid’s arrows shaped like syringes. There are clocks ticking away and jewelry pieces… It’s like the symptoms and distractions of everyday life, all wrapped up in your visual language. Can you talk more about that? 

These are like bookmarks in our narrative. We use objects as signifiers: costume jewelry, syringes… A lot of it stems from reading authors like Pier Vittorio Tondelli. His story Posto Ristoro from Altri Libertini was magical and also entertaining it plays on duality. On one side there’s fear, anxiety, constant danger. But then he makes syringes into characters scary but also seductive. Human-sized syringes you can imagine and fantasize about. 

Your “revelations” often come with humor, which makes them cathartic. For me, if I can’t laugh at an artwork, it better make me deeply uncomfortable. Only then do I want to dig deeper. 

Humor helps us talk about tough topics. I love making people laugh, it’s how I deal with social anxiety. And for both me and Bianca, it just comes naturally. Plus, since our work is collaborative, that process is fun by itself. 

Since we’re talking about play and language how in sync are you when it comes to joking, teasing, and pushing boundaries? 

Our connection has grown stronger over time. When you work and think together, it’s inevitable. That mutual energy is what brought us together in the first place. When you can joke about taboo or difficult topics especially ones that are queerer than the usual fare at an art school you start to form a bond. That’s still how we build our work today. 

Let’s talk about how your individual styles show up. Bianca feels more “arts and crafts” you see it in her use of embroidery, lace, glass… What’s your side of the work? 

Yeah, Bianca’s totally hands-on great at making things. I’m more awkward with that stuff. But I’m a strong writer. I help shape the concepts, the narrative, the text. She’s got a real feel for space and objects. We come from different backgrounds, too. She has a special connection to design. 

Speaking of backgrounds where’s Bianca from? And where are you from? 

Bianca is from Barcelona. She’s Italian-Spanish and grew up surrounded by architecture and design. She went to IED in Barcelona, then moved to Berlin. That’s where we met, and later she relocated to Geneva. I grew up in a small town in Lombardy, near Bergamo. No cultural background at all my parents only finished elementary school. I did my undergrad at the Brera Academy in Milan, studying with Alberto Garutti. But I struggled to find my place in Milan, so I left. First to Madrid for a year and a half, then to Berlin. Berlin was great back then you could get a studio cheap, build a network easily. No one cared how you paid the rent; they cared about your creative output. That’s changed now. Switzerland has been much more welcoming lately. 

We said we’d look back at some of your work. I love pieces that incorporate language, and yours always do. Which works come to mind first? 

It’s hard to choose, but I’d go with the blown-glass tears.You make the program for life, you make the program. That piece was part of Il resto di niente at Museo Madre in Naples last year. We made it in 2017, and it really captures our shared sensibility. That’s when we first started working with glass. In 2018, we used it again to create three little beings high on oxygen. Some days are diamonds, some days are stoned shown in Basel. That won us our first Swiss Art Award. It referenced the ways people rename STDs, dodge the topic, or confuse it. Like how in southern Europe people sometimes say they have “Mediterranean anemia” to avoid saying AIDS. Along those lines, oxygen becomes laughing gas. The three little creatures carrying it in backpacks are like red and white blood cells pretending to be a caprese salad. One of our narrative tricks talking about illness, addiction, and how substances impact relationships, sexuality, crises, and coping mechanisms. Tondeli is still our guiding light.

I also remember your piece with two champagne buckets full of ice in Copenhagen… And the neon cats in a trash bin in Milan, and those mirrored glasses at the Retrofuture show in Rome. 

The buckets were like Titanic icebergs echoing the tears piece. The Milan work, Yours/Mine, had blinking words and a fishbone fun and playful. Probably one of our most lighthearted pieces. In Rome, we imagined scenes reflected in the lenses of found sunglasses mailed in the middle of the show.

Your works feel like distinct statements that don’t overlap, but there’s always a duo-like structure. 

Duality shows up a lot. In one way, our work is binary it reflects a collaborative relationship. But it’s also non-binary in that it’s queer. Our pieces communicate the way we do with each other. 

Let’s wrap with Anus Horribilis, your 2024 solo show at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. What was that experience like, scaling your work up for a museum? What did it bring out in you?

 A lot of that work emerged after someone close to us shared they were near the end. Using poop as a theme was our way of walking the line between disaster and laughter. It’s this anti-bourgeois message that levels social differences. Then the discomfort turned into something else a meditation on death. 

Now you’re working on your first catalog almost a monograph celebrating ten years of RM. And you’ve got a public artwork planned for Geneva. 

Yes! The book’s called Decay a nod to “deca,” or ten years. The public artwork is part of Geneva’s Neon Parallax project and will go up in November. That’s when we’ll launch the book, too. Neon Parallax has been going since 2006 and features artists whose works light up rooftops around the Plainpalais square. They’re visible alongside commercial neon signs, so they need to be legible and welcoming not just for the art world. We want to make our piece feel like part of the city. Our idea? A public laundromat. But that’s all I can reveal for now…