Apoti | making Faces / clip

Every clip is composed of thousands of photographic fragments of butterfly wings, fragments that also form the visual basis of my PUZZLING POP Project, including >> Fantastic Portrait and >> Puzzling Warhol. I chose the title APOTI from the Greek ἀ- (a-, “not”) and πίνω (pínō, “to drink”), meaning “those who don’t swallow it.” My Apoti are those who refuse to passively accept the distorted narratives imposed on them—they are the unclouded minority, the ones who resist the intoxication of propaganda.

Each portrait emerges as a digital collage of these fragments, animated into sequences that produce grimaces, distortions, and fleeting expressions. The fragile yet powerful sound of hundreds of butterfly wings in flight breathes life into these faces. They traverse anger, laughter, shame, irony, sarcasm, and surprise. They are both extensions of myself and mirrors of those in the West who have resisted the mass hypnosis of mainstream narratives—narratives emptied of critique and obedient to the powers that govern Western societies. 

Since 9/11, I have witnessed our immersion in increasingly infantilized propaganda, designed to spread fear, resentment, and social division. This machinery shaped the storytelling around the so-called pandemic and the anthropogenic climate “emergency,” advancing the interests of vast financial and industrial conglomerates. Over the past twenty-five years, Western media have systematically cultivated fear—around:islamic terrorism, human-caused climate change, pandemic, and now war—providing the ideological framework for what Giorgio Agamben defines as the state of exception. What was once conceived as a temporary suspension of constitutional order has become the norm, making thinkable—and even discussable—the formerly unspeakable prospect of nuclear war.

In this project, I present a parade of faces—real people to whom I have given names (titles) drawn from the nomenclature of those whom Christian and biblical tradition call the Fallen Angels. 

They represent those who have resisted the homogenized propaganda of the neoliberal global order. Through theatrical sequences of expression, they respond to the pressing issues of our time in Western liberal globalist democracies: transhumanism, gender fluidity, the biosecurity paradigm, and surveillance capitalism—all mechanisms through which Power increasingly imposes itself upon populations.

These thirty-three individuals embody—through their facial expressions—the minority who have resisted pervasive cultural conditioning. This conditioning is more insidious than any overtly autocratic system, for the values ceaselessly proclaimed by the dominant order—freedom, democracy, peace, security, equality—are, in true Orwellian fashion, their exact opposite.

Mainstream media today depend entirely on global corporations and financial powers. They function as instruments to keep minds in darkness, spreading fear and absurd falsehoods that confuse, terrorize, and render citizens more docile, less capable of critical thought. This constant manipulation informs the grimaces of my APOTI: instinctive reactions to the grotesque distortions saturating our daily lives.

Recently, Western media have sought to convince the public that defending against an impossible Russian invasion of Europe requires diverting vast public resources and transforming our economies into permanent war economies. In doing so, they act as mouthpieces for the so-called Military-Industrial Complex, speaking through puppet leaders—absurd figureheads of a democracy in decline. My APOTI respond with laughter, rage, irony, and horror.

I chose to name each portrait after a Fallen Angel. In myth and esoteric tradition, Fallen Angels symbolize rebellion against supreme authority, the exercise of free will, and the courage to defy imposed order. They are not mere demons: they are archetypes of defiance, bearers of forbidden knowledge, embodiments of the shadow of freedom itself. By bearing their names, my APOTI become living icons of resistance. Their making faces are not signs of surrender but of awareness and defiance—instinctive reactions to the grotesque distortions of reality spread by the “Diffuse West.”

Together, these thirty-three faces form a Pantheon of Fallen Angels, each embodying a distinct emotional response to authority and propaganda. This symbolic constellation merges ancient mysticism with contemporary critique, mapping the tension between rebellion and control. Through their contorted expressions, my APOTI proclaim—clearly and defiantly: we do not swallow it.