Cut, Paste, Provoke! Meet Nazionale Senzafiltro, the self-taught Northern Italian illustrator channeling punk fanzine energy, homocore aesthetics, and the legacy of Mapplethorpe and Kruger into visceral hand-cut collages. Featured in Inspiro Magazine Issue 6.
The name alone announces intent. Nazionale Senzafiltro — unfiltered, national, unapologetic. It carries the energy of a cigarette pack warning that nobody obeyed, a slogan spray-painted on a wall before dawn. The Northern Italian self-taught artist who works under this moniker is not trying to whisper into the contemporary art world. He is cutting into it, literally, with scissors and glue and an unwavering commitment to the aesthetics of rebellion.
His tools are deliberately modest: paper, markers, and photographs sourced from the internet and printed out, raw materials of the everyday world, the kind of things that cost almost nothing and say almost everything. From these he constructs collages and illustrations that pulse with the visual grammar of another era, though their urgency feels entirely present-tense.
"He blends free provocation with homocore aesthetics, creating a continuous slippage of meanings."
The Lineage: Children of the xerox machine
To understand Nazionale Senzafiltro's work, you have to go back to Britain in the late 1970s, to a country in economic crisis generating cultural fury. Punk arrived not just as a sound but as a design language: hand-lettered, photocopied, deliberately rough, aggressively present. The fanzine, stapled, distributed by hand, printed on whatever budget allowed, became the vessel for voices that the mainstream had no interest in carrying. It was a medium of necessity that became a medium of art.
Senzafiltro draws directly from this well. His work carries the DNA of those UK fanzines and flyers, the post-punk and new wave scenes that understood visual culture as inseparable from political culture. Where the mainstream was polished, they were raw. Where the establishment was composed, they were chaotic. That aesthetic, far from being nostalgic in Senzafiltro's hands, reads as a structural choice, a refusal of the digital smoothness that dominates contemporary image-making, a deliberate anchoring in the physical and the handmade.
The Politics: Homocore and the continuous slippage
But Senzafiltro is not simply recovering a punk aesthetic, he is queering it. Homocore, the movement that emerged from the mid-1980s queer underground and punk scenes simultaneously, understood that both spaces had failed their most marginalised members. Mainstream gay culture wanted respectability; punk had become macho and exclusionary. Homocore was the answer: DIY, confrontational, refusing to make itself palatable to anyone who wasn't already in the room.
Senzafiltro works in that tradition. His bio describes what he creates as "a continuous slippage of meanings", a phrase that is quietly precise. The collage form, by its nature, destabilises: images pulled from their original contexts collide and produce new, unstable readings. When those images carry homocore aesthetics and queer provocation, the slippage becomes political. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is allowed to settle into safe interpretation. The viewer is kept in productive discomfort.
The freedom of this approach, what his bio calls "free provocation", is not the freedom of carelessness. It is the freedom of an artist who has decided not to protect himself from the implications of his own imagery, who follows his collisions wherever they lead.
His artistic process relies exclusively on traditional media — paper, markers, and printed photographs — a deliberate anchor in the physical against the polished flood of the digital.
The Influencers: Three mentors who never met
Among Senzafiltro's named inspirations sit three figures whose combined influence maps his concerns almost perfectly. Roberta Marrero, the Spanish multidisciplinary artist and trans activist who passed away in 2024, made decontextualised collage the engine of her most pointed political work. Her practice of taking images from popular culture, totalitarian iconography, and queer history and forcing them into new arrangements offers a direct precedent for how Senzafiltro thinks about meaning-making through juxtaposition. Marrero's legacy, of an artist who refused to separate her identity from her practice, runs through his work.
Robert Mapplethorpe brings a different charge: the confrontational elegance of the male gaze turned inward, the deliberate placement of queer bodies in the frame of fine art photography, the challenge to who gets to be beautiful and on whose terms. His work asked questions about visibility and desire that are still unresolved, and Senzafiltro's homocore sensibility clearly carries that restlessness.
And then Barbara Kruger — whose text-and-image combinations in the 1980s turned advertising's own visual language against itself, creating work that felt urgent and immediate, that demanded the viewer position themselves in relation to power. Kruger proved that the tools of mass culture could be seized and weaponised by those it excluded. For a collage artist working with found images and provocation, this is foundational territory.
Together, these three figures point toward an artist who thinks about image, identity, power, and desire all at once, and who has found in the humble materials of paper and print the means to hold all of that complexity.
The Practice: Against the algorithm
In an era when illustration is increasingly digital, when the tools of image-making have become invisible and seamless, Senzafiltro's insistence on exclusively traditional media reads as a position statement. Paper marks. Markers bleed. Photographs cut unevenly. The hand is always present in the work, and with it, the evidence of time, of physical engagement, of choice made at the level of the wrist.
His production ranges beyond collage and illustration, into writing, video, and photography, suggesting an artist who thinks of images and words as part of a single restless inquiry rather than separate disciplines. The fanzine tradition understood this too: the best of those publications were total environments, where text and image and design were inseparable.
And of course, there is music. His bio mentions it almost as an aside, "tons of music", but in the context of a practice rooted in punk and post-punk aesthetics, this is not a footnote. Music is the rhythm underneath. It always has been.
The Work: Follow the slippage
Nazionale Senzafiltro does not have a website, but his work lives on Instagram @nazionale_senzafiltro
What you will find there is an artist whose work rewards time and attention, collages that reveal more the longer you look, where the slippage of meaning is not immediately visible but accumulates, where provocation and beauty turn out not to be opposites at all. In Inspiró Issue 6, we are proud to bring his work to a wider audience, and to place it in the context it deserves: a conversation about queer art, visual culture, and the enduring power of making things by hand.
He is, in the best possible sense, unfiltered.
