Untitled

It is some time since I confessed—amidst glasses of champagne and celluloide whispers—that the art of self-portraiture had spent years sleeping the sleep of the just in my studio, buried beneath mountains of psychoanalytical textbooks and bindings of Sartre. But divas never die; at best, they recycle themselves with the elegance of a black-and-white Hitchcock retrospective. Today, the ghosts of the past quietly retire from the dressing room to hand over the spotlight to the only protagonist who matters: the Tini of this precise moment. Forget those snapshots from five years ago or a decade past that floated in this digital corner like relics from an archaeological museum of vanity. I am no longer in my twenties or early thirties, and the ingenuous souls who still dare to calculate a naive, youthful age for me are guilty of myopia worthy of urgent clinical diagnosis. I crossed the barrier of the forties some time ago, and far from being a Greek tragedy, this slow-cooked body rises today with the arrogance of an incunabulum: mature as a fine vintage, magnetic, and with the absolute certainty that true beauty does not apologise to the calendar.

Look closely at the photograph crowning this entry. It is not the girl from the yellowed posters; it is I, raw, sovereign and perfectly conscious of my own myth. Of course there is the odd wrinkle drawn with the precision of a stroke of Indian ink, and yes, if you sharpen your gaze beneath the dim neon light, you will see glimmers of silver hair shining with the insolence of a platinum tiara. It is the exact cartography of a woman who has lived far too intensely to go about asking for indulgences from bourgeois morality. Between the couch where I dissect the labyrinths of the unconscious of others and the viewfinder of my camera, I have understood that eroticism at this age ceases to be an empty promise and becomes a declaration of war. My skin no longer seeks the naive approval of novices; it demands the devotion of those who understand that desire is a thick, dark and sophisticated territory, governed solely by the firm pulse of someone who has already seen it all and, even so, chooses to sin with refinement.

For this reason, I have decided that the aesthetic of this space will undergo a seismic shift worthy of my new ambitions. Enough of bohemian improvisations; from this moment on, every single frame accompanying my words will possess the surgical rigor and opulence of a Vogue editorial, worthy of the glossy pages of a high-fashion bible, because quite simply I deserve nothing less. As the photographer of clinical gaze and cinematic soul that I have always been, I have returned to taking control of the lens to dissect myself with the same coldness with which a film director frames a definitive tracking shot. Whether I still model, they ask me with that mixture of stupor and slobbering curiosity from the stalls. And I reply with a feline smile: I never left, I was merely tuning the violins and preparing my grand return to the set, ready to remind them that the camera not only obeys me, but idolises me with an almost sacrilegious devotion.

So prepare yourselves to traverse this new chapter where psychology, celluloid and the most refined provocation intertwine in a single heartbeat. I shall continue to be the unappeasable diva who inhabits your most lucid fantasies and your most carnal insomnia, that creature who combines the neurosis of a Lacanian treatise with the magnetic insolence of a femme fatale stepped out of a 1940s film noir. This is I today, without filters from an old passport, overflowing with a mature sensuality that burns the fingertips to the touch and defies any social convention with the elegance of a queen in exile. Take the consequences of continuing to cross the threshold of my digital boudoir, for the performance has just begun and the script, as always, is written by me from the summit of my certainties.