Unlocking & Unmasking With the Powers of Art & Creativity

Letter From Our Editor in Chief Tommaso Cartia

Marco Gallotta
NYC-based Artist Marco Gallotta Masks Series – A tribute to all our first responders.

New York, May 20th, 2020,
how long have you been locked down? A couple of months? Is it really just a couple of months, or have we been living in stages of lockdown, on and off, since our life’s journeys began? Have we escaped? Have we tried to escape? With our bodies, with our minds, with our souls? Have we experienced freedom or are we still excruciatingly mingling with self-imposed or super-imposed imprisonments? Do we know that is our Self who is Super and has Super-powers? Are we aware of the superpower of our creative minds? Do we know that the Creation is never completed until we co-create it and expand its marvels with the pyrotechnical visions of the worlds we wish to live? 

How Long Have I Been Locked Down?

Tommaso Cartia
Tommaso Cartia – Editor in Chief of Creative Pois-On’s Storytelier.

That was one of my first thoughts when the surreal and yet super-real atmosphere of this global pandemic started clouding our vision and super-impose itself on our daily lives. Why was this atmosphere so familiar to me, where and when did I experience it? If I detected the origin of this feeling, could I have recollected how I dealt with it before, and what helped me to escape? The brutal desolation and isolation, the sorrow and the despair, with which this sneaky and virulent virus is paralyzing and polluting both our bodies and consciences, brought back virulent paralyzing and polluting memories.

Masking – An Old Habit
This is certainly not the first mask I’m wearing, and masking is a fashion that really never went out of style. How many times was I forced to wear a mask; a mask on my eyes for the worlds I wasn’t allowed to see or reach, a mask on my mouth for the words I wasn’t allowed to say, a mask on my heart for the feelings I was not allowed to express. How many days and nights, locked-down in a room wishing on lives, wishing on far-away lands and emotional landscapes I so wanted to walk in, fear-free, mask-free.

Free.

Art & Creativity – Compass of Our Lives
What helped me survive that isolation? What helped me expand my vision, my senses, and bring reality closer, shaped exactly how I envisioned it? It was Art, always, there were the artists, the mentors, the writers, the muses, injecting my mind with their purposeful creations. Art and Creativity are the compass of our lives, the sails unfurled navigating towards the ends of any horizon, transporting us through dimensions, unlocking all locks, unmasking all masks. 

With the same instinct that brought me to cling on to the artists to survive my many lockdowns and experiencing the life I’m leading today, we at Creative Pois-On felt that we needed to cling on to the artists to understand this very challenging time that we are facing, find in them guidance and find with them the time to rediscover how our own creativity can lead us to phase 2, 3, 4… of our future. As we are finding new measures to contain the spreading of this virus, and we are looking for effective treatments, the testimony of the artists of our times living through this pandemic, can give us creative measures to contain the spreading of our fears and treat our minds and souls to re-design the more sustainable world of tomorrow, humanly, ethically, economically. 

That’s why in the midst of all of this we launched a special project –#CreativityWillSaveUs

#CreativityWillSaveUs – Enjoy our Web Series on Creative Pois-On Official Youtube Channel.

A video/podcast series and social media campaign – nominated for the prestigious United Nations SDG Impact Awards – where prominent figures from the international world of art, culture, and entertainment come together to reflect on the central value that art brings to all humanity during these challenging quarantine times of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The initiative is also designed to support the global community of artists who are seeing all of their venues temporarily shut down to safely prevent the spreading of the Corona Virus.


Listen to the Podcast Series Here below:

Creative Pois-On thinks that this is the time to go back to basics, to the essential DNA of its mission: “More than 7 billion people are living on Planet Earth. Every single one of us is like an isolated island, a polka-dot (Pois, in French), seemingly disconnected from one another. Laptops, smartphones, and social media provide technological bridges, but the storylines we channel are the real threads for all of the living polka-dots around the world to truly connect in this infinite maze.” 

These words sound so incredibly current and important in this climate of fear and transformation. So Creative Pois-On thought to channel the extraordinary, talented voices of some of the artists whose stories and creations have been enriching the pages of the platform, both on the Creative Pois-On Podcast show, the editorial project – Storytelier – and the Creative Pois-On Official Youtube Channel. The reach extends beyond these outlets, enlarging CP’s tentacular maze to embrace a constellation of a different variety of artistic expressions and artists. All together they raise a voice that can break through these walls of isolation sending everybody a positive message that #CreativityWillSaveUs and that we can spend this time making the most out of our creative powers.

Follow us on this journey with the goal to find ourselves renewed and ready to soon unlock not only the doors of our houses but also the ones of our intuition, when this virus will dissipate and we will be asked to co-create the world of tomorrow, mask-free, fear-free.

Free. 

Ready, Set, Imagine!

Tommaso Cartia



Stonewall has Never Been Louder

Stonewall Outloud

With Stonewall OutLoud, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato revive the resounding echoes of the night of the N.Y.C. riots that 50 years ago saw the LGBTQ+ community rebelling against the prevailing conservatism winds that were—and still are in some regards—shaking the American stars and stripes. The torch of the testimony of the people who lived the uproar of those days is passed down to a new generation by featuring some prominent figures of today’s LGBTQ+ community, who lend their voices to the archival audio recordings of the veterans in a mirroring synesthesia. 

By Tommaso Cartia

From the moment this film is on to the moment that it is out, something so visceral touches the profound strings of your heart’s nostalgia, and invades you. It is like re-watching family videos, the voices of our loved ones traversing time and coming back to remind us about their once untamable aliveness, that resilient attachment to the gift of life preserved against any toiling struggles. In Stonewall OutLoud, our family is the extended LGBTQ+ community, with its toiling struggles, and its voices that we can’t dare to put to oblivion. 

Inspired by the audio-documentary Remembering Stonewall by Dave Isay, the movie, narrated by RuPaul, finds a vividly original way to vehicle the voices of the heroes of the uprising, shortening the physical and temporal distance by unleashing them out loud through some popular faces of the current LGBTQ+ scene. Like Actor, Comedian and Activist Daniel Franzese; Singer & Actor Lance Bass; Athlete Adam Rippon: RuPaul Drag Race Star Raja; and more, including Laith Ashley, Charlie Carver, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Fortune Feimster, Connor Franta, Isis King, Keiynan Lonsdale, Jinkx Monsoon, Ben J. Pierce, Michael Turchin, Amber Whittington and Alexis G. Zall.

Adam Rippon
Adam Rippon with Veteran of the Stonewall Tree Sequoia. Photo courtesy of David Magdael & Associates

Each one of them revisits rare and priceless material that even America’s history books have shamefully neglected, preventing our kids to fully understand that the freedom of costumes they can experience today when they effortlessly parade during a Gay Pride, was nothing but a strenuous conquest that cost the lives of many. “I connected with the material instantly because it is so important,” said Actor Daniel Franzese, commenting about his role in the documentary. “A lot of our history as queer people is erased, we don’t have any of that in our American history books, anything about gay people growing up in this country. It was completely washed away. When I was approached for the project, I immediately said yes, because it got to me that at this point in my life, as an LGBTQ activist, actor and gay man, I should definitely know more about this stuff. These stories should be all learned and engrained in our consciences,” continued Franzese. 

From the left: Director Randy Barbato, Actor Daniel Franzese, Veteran Activist and SirusXM Host Larry Flick and Daniel Mitchell from Youtube Originals. Photo courtesy of David Magdael & Associates

Emmys and GLAAD Media Award-winning directors Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, the visionary minds behind WOW (World of Wonder) – the production that created masterpieces of contemporary LGBTQ+ entertainment beginning with RuPaul’s Drag Race – continue to wonder their audience, weaving together the fragmented history of the American gay community and leaving a profound trace in its legacy and in our conscience.

Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey
Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey. Photo courtesy of David Magdael & Associates

“The film was inspired by Dave Isay, the man behind StoryCorps, who 20 years after the Stonewall riots released the audio-documentary Remembering Stonewall,” says Barbato explaining the inception of the project: “We were approached by Youtube Originals to do a film about it and we asked ourselves, ‘How can we bring this back to life?’ Initially, we really didn’t know, it was difficult because there is very little visual archive of the Stonewall uprising. Our number one goal was to find an effective way to communicate the story to a younger generation. We made it happen and it was really sort of magical the way that our performers connected with the voices and the material in the film, it felt so surprisingly organic.” And it feels so surprisingly organic to absorb, as an audience, this alive, out-loud page of American History, that should never ever be put on Mute.