Studio portraits. Tattooing and photography. Ediz. italiana e inglese

Studio Portraits is an editorial project dedicated to the work of Michele Servadio, an evolution of the artist's first book How to Forget About a Song, produced and curated by Varsi in collaboration with Paola Pompili.
While the first publication was a handcrafted, intimate, and tactile object, this new edition broadens the perspective and offers a more layered and conscious reading of his research. The volume gathers years of photographic practice born from the need to preserve what tattooing-ephemeral by its very nature-leaves on the body. In the portraits taken in his English studio, which is both home and creative laboratory, tattooing enters a broader system where painting, sculpture, performance, and text intertwine within a coherent universe, where each work nourishes the others. At the center of Servadio's work lies metamorphosis: of the body, of space, of identity. Skin and film become symbolic boundaries between interior and exterior, between present and memory. Photography does not merely document; it transforms, it rescues an archaic, ritual gesture from loss and delivers it to the archive, restoring it a broader temporal dimension. Through an essay and an interview edited by Daniela Collu, the book highlights the tension that runs throughout the artist's research: holding together different practices within a cohesive system, building a recognizable language without belonging to a single category, transforming experience into vision. Studio Portraits tells the story of a compact and constantly evolving creative universe, where memory, mark, and body coexist in a necessary and radical balance.