Artist Mauro Pinotti is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘backstage’. To see Mauro ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

This curatorial ‘backstage’

“Locked in a room with three drag queens” might seem like the beginning of an anecdote or a joke. In reality, it is the starting point of a suspended, shared time. A small room, the dressing room, where the world remains outside and identity is not yet established.

Here, the transformation occurs slowly, without an audience. Bodies prepare, observe, and change. There is no pretense in the gesture, but attention, care, and concentration. The game of becoming someone else intertwines with the need to be, perhaps for the first time, completely oneself.

The photographs are born from proximity. They do not seek the excess of the scene, but the vulnerability of the before. In this intimate space, drag reveals itself as a profound act of identity construction: something worn, tried on, felt on the skin, without the need for a final definition.

The dressing room thus becomes a place of temporary truths, where the mask does not hide but reveals, and where being looked at means being welcomed, even if only for an instant, into the possibility of existing.

BIO:

Mauro Pinotti is a self-taught artist who expresses himself through photography, painting, and sculpture. His artistic journey is distinguished by a constant search for expressive synthesis, reducing forms to the bare essentials to communicate profound and incisive messages. His art does not allow itself to be pigeonholed into predefined styles, but develops freely, exploring themes related to the human condition, the environment, and social reality. His works are metaphors of a declining civilization, mirrors in which the viewer is invited to reflect and question themselves. The visual impact of his creations derives from the combination of contrasting elements, the strength of symbols, and the rawness of representation. Through a direct and provocative language, Pinotti stirs consciences and stimulates critical thinking. The connection with nature is a fundamental element of his poetics. The earth, understood as the origin of life and biodiversity, plays a central role in his artistic reflections. Concern for the environment and the denunciation of its transformations are recurring themes in his work, both photographic and sculptural. Pinotti approaches every stage of the creative process with a handcrafted and personal approach, from the initial conception to the final realization. He has experimented with innovative techniques such as the use of Braille on photographs, scratching images printed on iron, and applying cement to photographs. Each work is born as a synthesis of his thinking, not to inspire dreams but to inspire reflection, with emotion as the inevitable consequence of his intense and authentic vision.

All images and text © Mauro Pinotti