In The Discos I Never Talked to Anybody

L.L.: One thing that I found funny was the closing of that conversation that is in the book “Disco to Disco” where you say, “In the discos I never talked to anybody.”
Paradoxically, this is the same thing that happened to me with the difference that in your case there were thousands of people. Perhaps a presence, that however vast looks quite irrelevant from the point of view of interrelation, as if it had no individuality, except then finding it in the photographs.

M.V.: The thing was really remarkable in the sense that we would go, we would ask permission from the discotheque’s owners who you could never talk to. It was all people who at three o’clock in the afternoon are asleep, at five o’clock are asleep, then at eight o’clock have dinner, then go to the disco. Disaster. It was already difficult enough to get in touch with the discotheque’s owners. Even once we got the contacts we wanted to talk to, finding them was difficult. They were silent people. Plus when we got there they wouldn’t give a damn and wouldn’t talk to us. We would set the flashes, the rest, people would not talk to us, so we would stay seven, eight, ten hours in a place absolutely alone.
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L.L.: Another interesting aspect, which goes beyond the discos, was an excerpt of the conversation in the book Disco to Disco, in which Giovanna Calvenzi points out how the needs of photography are related to the historical moment in which they are produced, showing moments that one does not always want to investigate in the contemporary, but instead taking on a role as an important document later on. Therefore, back to us, in the discos, the historical moment influences how twenty years ago your focus was on the people in the discos while, in my case, today it is on their absence.

M.V.: Definitely, we are always witnessing. The most useless things turn out to be the most interesting, in my opinion.