Vada by Neeko Paluzzi

Neeko Paluzzi is a lens-based artist and educator working with images, text, and installation. Drawing on a background in linguistic pedagogy, he approaches art as an act of translation, developing intertextual projects that situate historical texts within contemporary frameworks. Influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, he understands translation as unstable and cumulative, where each iteration carries the conditions of its making. His projects often begin with an originating text — the Urtext — and its subsequent adaptations, treating these versions as coexisting rather than hierarchical. This approach resists linear authorship and colonial frameworks, aligning with queer theories of multiplicity and refusal of singular origin.

His practice moves between digital and analog processes, including collage, text-based composition, and darkroom techniques. These methods allow for layered acts of citation in which sources accumulate across time, sometimes spanning centuries. Authorship in his work is distributed: each reference becomes part of a network of interdependent ideas, foregrounding translation as a shared and ongoing process rather than a fixed outcome.

Polari is a queer-coded lexicon — variously described by scholars as a proto-language or linguistic styling — that emerged from Mediterranean ports, circuses, and theatrical cultures in the late eighteenth century. Drawing from Italian, French, Spanish, English, and Arabic, polari functioned as a system of verbal signifiers through which queer people identified kinship and signaled desire. Though limited to roughly one hundred words and lacking formal syntax, its adaptability allowed it to be embedded within multiple mother tongues, ensuring secrecy and mobility. Terms such as drag, butch, and trade persist today, evidencing its evolution from coded speech to cultural inheritance. These small photographs resemble language flash cards, compressing meaning into discrete, repeatable units that rely on recognition rather than explication. Lavender fingerprints operate as mark and signal, an index of contact and transmission referencing covert exchange between intergenerational queer people, extending polari’s logic into image and touch.