Project: Object of desire. Simone Artale
Feed Overview

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.

hamartía - basic concept of
the exhibition

 We often think of hamartía — the so-called “tragic flaw” of a character — as a moral shortcoming. Hubris, ambition, jealousy. Something broken in the soul that leads, inevitably, to downfall. But maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe hamartía isn’t about sin or character defects. Maybe it’s just about time. Or choice. Or, deeper still, about desire — desire mistimed, misplaced, misread.




In Greek, hamartía means “to miss the mark.” Like an arrow that flies true, but at the wrong moment. Not evil. Just off.




What if we imagined the tragic flaw not as some failing, but as a kind of unavoidable human gamble — a decision made in the heat of wanting. Oedipus seeks the truth. Antigone seeks justice. Neither are villains. They are people who chose, with urgency, with love even — and their choices closed other doors. The tragedy is not that they were wrong. The tragedy is that they had to choose at all.




Desire, then, is not the flaw. It’s the condition. Hamartía becomes a shadow cast by desire’s light — not its punishment, but its echo in time. We want, we move, we choose. And only later — sometimes much later — do we see what we missed. And maybe that’s the real drama. Not that we fell. But that we were never going to be able to hold it all.