Ghanaian | Italian

Mattia Guarnera.jpg

I generally call myself mixed race.  I don’t have much connection with my Ghanaian side but somehow I still feel Ghanaian in a way.

I am an artist by choice, there is no explanation for it, both my parents were creative, my mum a dancer, my dad an artist, but he did not do much with it. I have always had two sides to my life, when I went to Italy I was always the only black person there and looked down upon so after 2 months even my personality would change and I would even change the way I dress to fit into being white.

I have dealt with race a lot in my art world. So I would immediately want to do a piece of work about that. But then I have two conflicted sides within me, one I don’t want to deal with race in my art but then at the same time, do I want to limit myself like a lot of artist have in the past to always talk about race.  I would rather be beyond that and just do what I want to do. Like my tutor, she would always mention… “Aw look at this artist he is black…” Its calm, its fine but at the same time like if I see a white artist skill as like that I could just implement that just as well as a black person and I am not even black at the end of the day, I am mixed-race.

If I were to be born again, I would like to come back 100% myself again. Even culturally with what I want to do as an artist, coming from Africa, the Mother Nature full of history and art and look at Italy a land of art and history. For centuries it has been one of the world's top art destinations in the world.

I am very exited I am who I am. I think the future will be good for people who are mixed race and it’s just a silly word really. I am sure in the future we wont be able to keep track of who everyone is.