Project: Object of desire. Simone Artale

A conversation with AI.


I was born in Rome, beneath that bloated sun that spills itself too easily, too golden, and raised among saints with cracked hands and the smell of dust in libraries. Jesuit fathers spoke in riddles, and I believed them. I studied their theology like one counts rosary beads — not for answers, but for the rhythm of unknowing.
Then Berlin. The cold, the gray. A different kind of chapel. I walked into its veins, its cellars, its wet electric nights. Philosophy by day, skin by night — I tattooed symbols onto strangers as if I could carve meaning into flesh.

I paint. Because I don’t know how else to survive the image.

My studio is in Weißensee now. A dog, a wife, a few ghosts.

Greece calls in the winter, with olives and bones and the blinding white that forgives nothing.

This project — INFLUENCE: Objekt of Desire — is not a work.

It’s the hunger that remains when the miracle doesn’t come.

The politics of the cross.





WIP. I worked on the body and the tattoos. I’ve made it clear that he has a uniform—like the ones in El Salvador—falsely accused, no due process.

Thinking about the signs of the Passion: how can I bring them in?
The politics of the cross.
24 Apr. 2025

The Pope has died.

He stayed until the end. Not just in office, but in his body—offered as a final sign.

A body made public. The body as politics. 

This is the core of my meditation:

How do we paint the Eucharist, not as symbol, but as real event—as the moment when a body, broken and visible, becomes presence?


Agamben teaches us that the camp—detention centers, deportations, exceptions to law—is the hidden structure of modern politics.

Christ was crucified in such a space.

A public execution, outside protection, inside spectacle.

Bare life exposed.

Rome made Him an example—a warning. He became the excluded included, the one made to hang within the system, but outside its protection.


The transformation of deportation into invitation.

A reversal of violence—not through power, but through presence.

In the Trumpian World


In our time, we see the rise of new camps—detention centers, deportations, biometric borders.

Bodies reduced to paperwork.

Families divided by legal process or without process.

Politics eliminating bodies.


But the Eucharist speaks a different language.


It says:

You are not illegal.

You are not disposable.

You are not forgotten.

You are worth your own hunger, desire. 

A body within a body that is given not taken. 


That is not a moral act.

That is a political one




Τοῦτό ἐστι τὸ σῶμά μου, τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν διδόμενον 

This is my body, given for you.