Sagg Napoli – Radical Acceptance

Phoebe Roberts: You’ve spoken about growing up between intensity and beauty in Naples. How has the visual and emotional landscape of the city – its religious iconography, chaos, ornamentation and proximity to the sea – shaped your visual language?

Sagg Napoli: I think it’s the contrast. Growing up in Naples meant being surrounded by contradiction: devotion next to profanity, ornament next to decay, kindness next to violence. That tension taught me to accept complexity rather than resolve it. My visual language carries that layered intensity. I’m drawn to co-existence. Naples made contradiction feel natural, even necessary.

PR: Naples carries a layered relationship to devotion, ritual and survival. Do you see echoes of Catholic symbolism or southern Italian matriarchal culture surfacing in works like your recent text-based image series on emotional endurance?

SN: Yes, absolutely. Those structures are embedded in me. Catholic symbolism – the body, suffering, endurance, transcendence – sits very close to how I understand emotional intensity. And southern Italian matriarchal culture, with its strength, sacrifice and survival strategies also resurfaces in the work. Even when it’s not explicit, that language of devotion and resilience shapes the emotional architecture of what I make.

PR: You left Naples to build your practice elsewhere. What parts of the city feel like they’re still “behind the scenes” in your work – present but not always visible to the viewer?

SN: Those temporary, improvisedconstructions that somehow become permanent. I think of it as “neo-melodic architecture”: emotionally excessive, ornamental, unapologetically sentimental structures. It might not be immediately visible, but it’s foundational.

LOUIS VUITTON jacket & trainers, stylist’s own tights

PR: In your Instagram text-image posts, you write about “consistency over intensity.” The pairing of disciplined physical training with raw emotional language feels deliberate. When you first began archery, did you already sense it would become conceptual material, or did that connection emerge later?

SN: The conceptual connection came later. At first, archery was something I needed for myself. It was a way to regulate, to focus, to create structure. The language emerged from lived practice, not the other way around.

PR: In both sport and art, there’s a lot of repetition behind a single successful outcome. What have you learned about patience and failure through archery that has reshaped your creative process?

SN: Patience, definitely. Archery teaches you that the outcome is a consequence, not the goal. You can’t obsess over the target; you have to focus on alignment, breath and consistency. Missing teaches you radical acceptance. That shifted my creative process. I’m less reactive now. I understand that repetition isn’t stagnation – it’s refinement.

PR: Your practice spans photography, performance, text works, moving image, installation and even physical training. How do these mediums influence one another in your process?

SN: It’s primarily a reflection of how my mind operates in relation to my body. I’ve always been more invested in the transmission of a message than in the materiality of the artwork itself. The medium is a conduit, a link to something else. I move between forms depending on the idea. Archery and sport are slightly different. They aren’t primarily artistic tools; they’re practices I need to stay grounded and sane. But inevitably, they inform the work. Text, especially, gave me access to my thoughts at a time when accessing them felt very hard. Writing became a way of witnessing myself.

PR: With the different disciplines you work across, do you feel like you have several personalities that you apply to each of them, or is it always the same SAGG Napoli?

SN: I always have to be careful with that question because the idea of having different personalities can touch on borderline traits. Sometimes I find myself trying to separate what is simply me from what might be pathological, only to loop back and realise that even those aspects are still part of me. What I do believe in is complexity. I’m drawn to people who have nurtured and come to terms with the many sides of themselves. And yes, I think dedicating myself to different disciplines has been a way of understanding the many sides of who I am.

PR: Is SAGG Napoli an alter ego, and if so, how is she different from Sofia Ginevra Giannì?