“I imagined the first time Akhenaten, pharaoh of Egypt in the 18th dynasty and Tutankhamun’s father, met Nefertiti, a girl from Earth. They are alone, he is showing off his oversized head, proud, nonchalant, displaying his golden sceptre with blue stripes. The story of Akhenaten is intertwined with many fantastic elements, including the one about his skull, so large that one could imagine he descends from aliens as the result of some hypothetical cross-breeding between aliens and terrestrials. The drawing, custom-made for the 18th Bologna Future Film Festival, is based on an old, faded photograph showing a couple, the man probably a soldier, as they are holding each other tenderly in front of a belvedere. Time impacted the photograph, making the soldier’s head almost disappear in what seems like maybe a hot air balloon in the rarefied landscape. The intervention on the image made the head and the hot air balloon melt into one, and the bodily features typical to my paintings, narrow eyes and a pointed nose, emerged, all golden, like the completely hand-painted curved rod, perfectly merging into the story of this first meeting between the two races. Welcome Aliens”.

Luigi Presicce