November 03, 2025

The Method of the Other: Art as Exercise, Identity as Practice

INTERVIEW WITH LUCA DE LEVA FONDATORE DI THYSELF AGENCY

BY VERTIGINI STUDIO

Ph, Sara Scanderebech

There is a moment in Luca De Leva’s trajectory where the artwork stops being an object and becomes a method of knowledge. From painter and performer, De Leva transforms into the founder of a structure that is both poetic and real:Thyself Agency, a “travel agency” that doesn’t sell experiences but exchanges them, a school of dis-identification where the self dissolves in order to be reborn in the other.

In the Life Exchange project, people swap entire lives — homes, names, relationships — to understand what remains of oneself when everything else changes.

In Nine Days Week, time itself is reorganised: a nine-day calendar to rediscover space for thought and dream. Everything in Thyself Agency is rooted in a maieutic, Socratic, experiential principle: art not as representation but as an experiment in consciousness. In the text Another Method, published by NERO Editions, De Leva speaks of “practices of liberation,” of a secular and embodied spirituality, of an art that does not produce objects but methods of transformation.

It is a path that begins from the self but does not end there — a process that unravels identity to rebuild a collective, perceptive, therapeutic language.

At Vertigini Journal, we asked him nine questions — questions that oscillate between the analytical and the intuitive, between philosophical reflection and ironic short circuit. Because, as Deleuze wrote, “a method is not a rule but an adventure.”

VS: Luca, your Thyself Agency is at once a school, a laboratory, and a secular religion.When did you understand that your work was no longer about producing artworks, but about creating conditions for experience? And how much of this shift was an artistic act, and how much instead a personal necessity?

LDL: I think that the school is the ideal place to let the agency’s activity express itself. It is exactly a laboratory — I would say an anthropological laboratory.There are no dogmas in our method; it is born each time a journey begins. It is very far from the idea of a religion, and imagining it as such stirs in me a passionate embarrassment. As for the secular, I can only say that secularization dealt me the final blow to the head, and now I don’t even remember the way home.

This is one of the aims of Thyself Agency: to rehabilitate myself after an accident. It is always a personal necessity — personal and collective become identical once you discover who you are.Thanks to every journey carried out, I was able to merge and dissolve into the nature of the person who departed; we all looked into each other’s eyes, and in that moment we were the same thing.

I know that among those of you interviewing me, there is someone who participated by exchanging their life — you see, we are still here, bound by a mystical friendship that makes us be ourselves and everyone.

VS: Your path seems to move from the surface of the canvas to the surface of existence.When did you understand that the image could become experience, and that the Other could become your new working material?

LDL: Immediately — even before imagining myself as an artist. But it took me a very long time to welcome that vision and become aware of it. I fought deeply with myself, trying to destroy myself, and when I finally succeeded, I was ready. My image had stopped appearing, and every life reflected itself in my eyes as I unfurled, soaking myself in the world.Thanks to every journey carried out, I was able to merge and dissolve into the nature of the person who departed; we all looked into each other’s eyes, and in that moment we were the same thing.

Thanks to every journey carried out, I was able to merge and dissolve into the nature of the person who departed; we all looked into each other’s eyes, and in that moment we were the same thing.

VS: In Another Method, you speak of an art that does not aim to produce images but to generate conditions of perception. It is as if your work sought not to show, but to modify the very gaze of those who participate. Are you still interested in representation, or do you now work exclusively on the perceptive, pre-linguistic level, where art becomes a form of sensory re-programming?

LDL: I think of Thyself Agency as a work of art. Its formalisation is the INFO POINT, and its realisation consists of the exercises. The INFO POINT is an itinerant office for the experimentation of existential practices, where we propose personal and intimate exercises meant to dismantle behavioral automatisms and facilitate the search for other ways of living and relating to the world.

We will open the next one on November 15 at Portofranco—you can find the information here: https://portofranco.eu/agenda/

All the people who have participated in the journeys we organize, carrying out one or more of our exercises, have spontaneously created the artwork within themselves.They chose the meaning of this word, finding it thanks to the quantity of distractions eliminated and to the quality of the inner silence that emerged.

Imagine no longer being yourself for a week: you live someone else’s life, while they live yours.Who becomes whom? But above all: who? Imagine working all the time and having only the weekend to cultivate your real interests—would you want more days? You can have them.

Imagine wearing extraordinary glasses that allow you to see yourself from the outside in real time, to live while watching yourself live, to be your own third person. How many things could you discover? Did you imagine it? Contact us and we will make it real.These are the exercises of Thyself Agency.

This is my idea of a work of art.

VS: In Life Exchange, people exchange their lives and discover, apparently, a powerful antidepressant.

Are you an artist or a pharmacist of consciousness? And where does care end and art begin?

LDL: Beautiful definition — pharmacist of consciousness. I am an agent within the agency; together with the other agents, we carry out what seems necessary to us.The same goes for what is found: people find what they need.The paths are steep, invisible, but once discovered, straight.

The definitions we give ourselves are useful to make us understandable. I was an agent and now I am a pharmacist; before it was art and now it is a cure. We could keep having fun inventing new ones, and I hope we will — but the true name is only one.

VS:A participant recounts that, living the life of another woman, she discovered she felt nostalgia for herself.

It’s one of the most powerful sentences I’ve read in an art text in recent years.

I ask you: can empathy become an aesthetic tool, or is it rather the very material of the work?

LDL: At this link you can read all the testimonies of those who have taken part in a journey: https://www.thyself.agency/journal/ You will find many reflections capable of disturbing you, enchanting you, convincing you, and disgusting you.

Empathy exists only between individuals — but what if individuality were a superstition?

I propose a new way of looking at artworks, no longer based on contemplation and empathy, but on lived experience, on immersion and intimate fusion. If you know something, you are that thing — like a drop becoming the ocean.

In your visual language — website, texts, devices — a hypnotic purple dominates, a color that seems to belong more to a dream than to a brand. Is it a ritual code, a vibration, or an energetic field? What role does synesthesia play in your method?

LDL:The method is made solely of direct experience, where the participant physically confronts an idea by lying to one of the three elements that form the basis of our material life.

The first exercise manipulates identity, the second the perception of time, and the third the perception of space.

Thyself Agency generates the context and consequently the inner terrain suitable for the participant’s descent into the field, where they must enact the real discovery.

When my dear friend Gianandrea Poletta created the agency’s website www.thyself.agency, he made the whole thing purple.

The color of this terrain is purple.

You often speak of “exercises, “methods,“agents.” It sounds like a secret agency or a contemporary monastery.

But who is truly the artist today: the one who invents the experience, or the one who lives it in their place?

LDL: It is life itself that is the artist.To the extent that ideas are true, they belong to truth — all those called artists or geniuses are simply sensitive receivers, but they possess nothing.

Not even the name anymore.We absolutely must rediscover it. The knowledge of the name is the path of every artist.

Looking at your path — from Monza to Beirut, from Brera to Thyself Agency — one perceives a constant: art as a practice of transforming reality. What are you seeking today, Luca? A new form of community, a new idea of time, or simply a different way of saying “I”?

I always and only seek truth; truth is the only cure.

By Vertigini Studio