Questions On is the video interview format created by C41.
This episode is with LEONE and Ze in the Clouds, a creative duo brought together by the desire to tell an extraordinary story of love, life and tuning. They left Milan behind and went to Vasto, to portrait a unique group of kids and capture how they live, how they hang on the streets, and how they are getting the attention of young girls by making loud noises with their vehicles.
You can watch the interview on the C41 YouTube channel and also read it below.
Award-winning film director and photographer.
He likes creating absurd stories, often carrying a refined comic side that is hidden even in tragedy.
Jazz pianist recognized as the greatest Italian talent of his generation.
He likes contaminating Jazz with contemporary expressive instruments with Afro American roots.
How did the idea of this artistic collaboration come about?
LEONE : The search for subcultures and communities is always the basis of my work.
For many years I haven’t used the language of music videos; in fact, ‘Sting Like A Bee’ is more a music film for me. It was born from a great quest and passion for subcultures related to the adolescent world, as my cinematographic references are Gus Van Sant, Larry Clark, Ari Marcopoulus. Consequently, I wanted to pay homage once again to the province, and the meeting with Ze in the Clouds, which I saw playing in a basement in a Milanese jazz club, hit me. And the project was born from there.
ZE IN THE CLOUDS: Leone Balduzzi and I met about a year ago for a series of concerts that I had to do in collaboration with C41 and the Salone del Mobile in Milan. I was preparing the album which will soon come out, the first album with the name of ‘Ze in The Clouds’. So, as soon as Leone talked to me about the ‘Sting Like A Bee’ project, it seemed to be optimal to start this new path with him, who is a person with whom I get along very well, both professionally and creatively. Besides, he needed a love song, but one that gave a particular mood, which is what we were looking for in the video, and my song ‘Lean’ seemed particularly appropriate to me, so once he liked it too, we started.
This film is a tribute to courtship. What role does love play in your life?
LEONE: The project does not start from a well-defined narrative structure. Let’s say that the research started from this subculture with a passion for tuning the Ape Piaggio. And after that, with my creative director Nico Carrassi, we decided to deepen the courtship between teenagers, and we realized that the young males who are part of this community use their passion for engines to conquer and attract ‘bees’ to their ânectarâ. So, the male figure takes the place of the female one, and symbolically we have linked the world of bee pollination to the one of adolescents, who court each other âto pollinate’. Men through the tuning of these engines, and women, instead, through social media, TikTok, and Reels. So it came out this slice of life that we told with an interesting perspective and aesthetics.
ZE IN THE CLOUDS: Love certainly has a fundamental role in my life and also for a long time, but at the time I wrote ‘Lean’ I was in a more heavy phase, and that period is reflected in the entire album. But it didn’t bother me talking about love because almost all my songs talk about love. There is simply a strong contrast between the world of sounds and the lyric one, which is more focused on words.
Where do you get inspiration for your work?
LEONE: I tend to be inspired by chance. I mean, the randomness and the casualty poetic are very compelling topics for me, on which I try to base my research. Chance, which then becomes the backbone of the narrative structure of the things I stage. Research is fundamental, as both aesthetically and narratively, before getting to deepen some topics, I go off the coast, and then get back to deepen something that I hadn’t thought of studying. So, chance becoming narrative, this is precisely what always brings me to stories that maybe don’t mean shit, but that express everything to me.
ZE IN THE CLOUDS: Inspiration is usually in everything that surrounds me and happens to me throughout the day, good and bad. Because those are the things that affect how the song arrives at everyone’s ears. From this derives the fact that during this quarantine it is harder to write and draw stimuli from the external environment, from what I do, and from the people I see…because I am not seeing anyone.
Credits:
Featuring: Leone Balduzzi @leonedirector, Ze in the Clouds @ze_intheclouds
Curated by Nico Carrassi
Visual:Â C41.eu
Editor: Elena Ottavi