The duo Chiachio and Giannone define themselves as an artist with two heads and four hands. Taking up the best of the legacy of the historical avant-gardes, for them life and work are no longer a separate matter.

The story of Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone seems marked by a multiple subalternity that they decided to turn into a flag as full of details as the embroideries on their works. They ignored the gender mandate that did not resist homoparental couples, abandoned the precept of the art world that sought to consecrate proper names and finally took a bastardized technique as minor and took it to the most important museums globally. Queer before the queer fashion, they became artistic exponents of a community that claimed rights. L&#39;OFFICIEL: Both in your work and in the articulation with other artists there is a commitment to the collective. What is the ideological position behind that? Chiachio and Giannone : We have always been interested in breaking the limits of artistic practices. When we started working together, we knew we wanted to dissolve individualities to be something a little bigger. Starting from breaking with the individual, we also began to work in community with other artists, like a group of embroiderers from a rural region of the province of Buenos Aires or, for example, in California, where we built a flag with four thousand people. We believe that thinking of authorship as a proper name is from past centuries. The contemporary world questions us about different ways of collective production. L&#39;O: In your work there is a construction that unites art and life. What was the future of this logic? CH and G: We think of art and life as the same thing, we are not interested in separating them. When we started working together, 20 years ago, it was a decision to understand and realize that together we were better and that this way of moving through art would go through all the time we were together. There is an intention to live in a permanent mode of production. We also make a commitment to the reuse of materials for domestic use, to give them a second chance and trace all the affective ties that may exist in the history of fabrics, for example. Textiles have memory, they are generally donated by other people who give them to us as if they were giving us a treasure that concentrates affection. L&#39;O: In the choice of embroidery as a technique, the attempt to unite the &quot;high&quot; of art with the &quot;low&quot; of the popular is also perceived. How do you conceive this tension? CH and G: Embroidery interested us for various reasons, especially because it is an activity or a technique linked to the female world and we wonder what happens when two men appropriate this technique. There is a whole political gesture in replacing brushes and acrylics with embroidery threads, needles and scissors. On the other hand, we wanted to erase the limits between work and gender, and that is something we did from the first instance. Likewise, the embroidery technique helped us when deciding to extend the collaborations, including other artists with the intention of creating affective networks within art. When we chose embroidery as a technique and technology to do our work, we knew very well that it could be with one leg within the high and the other leg within the low or popular. We never felt that there was a tension between one world and the other, but rather there was a kind of good coexistence. We find ourselves in the middle trying to reconcile these two universes. L&#39;O: As you mention, embroidery used to be associated with the world of the feminine. How was the process of turning the stigma into a flag, both from the technique and from the themes? CH and G: When we made this kind of conversion from painting to embroidery, we were very aware that it was a task assigned to the female world, so when two men, a gay male couple, are working with this technique, there is a political position about of the task itself. After so many years of practice, and sometimes unconsciously, this stigma is transformed into a flag, or a word in defense of rights, to be spokespersons for a community. A practice done in a very intimate place, but when you exhibit it in a public space, it enters into dialogue with society. In addition, from the beginning there was a decision to put ourselves as protagonists in our works, where we showed that we were a family of two men when there was not even the law of equal marriage or the law of gender identity.

Embroider your village: Chiachio and Giannone

Embroider your village: Chiachio and Giannone

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