A showcase of paintings by Paloma Blanco Casanova and text by Chiara Bardelli Nonino featured in A Magazine No.23 Curated By Francesco Risso.
I can pinpoint with some precision the first time I watched porn —- if we ignore those flickering boobs on local TV channels late at night, of course. It was my 12th birthday, and I had invited an all-girl group of friends to spend the afternoon at my parents’ home. The highlight of the day was that one of them had smuggled two VHS tapes from her uncle’s porn collection, and we had a short unsupervised timeframe to watch them. To be frank, we’re talking of L’Histoire d’O and La Bête — two classical specimens of the trickiest kind of porn, the soft kind. They featured a glimpse of genitalia and people having sex, so for the pre-internet generation, that was more than enough. We watched them for something like 15 minutes, giggling and marvelling with repulsion at what an erect penis looked like, and then we moved on to more interesting stuff: boys, make-up and school gossip. The girl who brought the tapes asked me to hide them and give them back to her later that week, because her mom was picking her up and carrying them around in her backpack was way too risky. And of course, my mom found them, poorly ensconced in a dusty corner of my room and flipped out. She was — and still is — an Italian mom, after all. I remember that it was such an innocent thing, a silly transgression — until it wasn’t, turning into something shameful and dark.