My Mum Won't Let Me Wear My Bloodstained T-Shirt

Tara von Neudorf is a Romanian artist who often finds himself censored because in his work he likes to take on controversial themes like war and terrorism. I have interviewed him about his art a couple of times, and what I have found even more interesting than his paintings have been his clothes, which are so beautifully strange I've not been able to stop staring. Animal bones, plastic dolls, beer openers, blood… you name it, he wears it. In an attempt to appear like even more of a stalker, I got in touch for the hundredth time and asked if he'd let me photograph him in his studio in the middle of Bucharest. The one bedroom apartment looks a little like a train wagon and is covered in his work from floor to ceiling. When I walked in, I found Tara sleeping on a mattress on the floor, with a tombstone for a headrest and heavy metal blasting from the stereo.

VICE: Good morning, what's that tombstone doing at the top of your bed?
Tara von Neudorf: A girl once told me that here is a place of death. I’m actually praising life by using death elements. This is my tombstone. One of them, because by my will, I´ll be buried in four places: The head in the town of Mureș, where I was born, the right hand at Engelthal village, where I have land, my heart at Neudorf, the village that gives me my family name and the rest of the body in the village Râul Sadului from were I took the Tara name, from a great grandmother that lived there. Each tombstone will write: "Here lies the right hand of the servant of God, Tara. Or the head, the heart and so forth.”

Why do you make clothes?
I don’t consider myself a designer but the clothes I find in shops are shitty. I don’t like them, they are too expensive or they don’t fit me. I also don’t like spending money. To me, everything must be free. Then where do you get these clothes from?
I find shirts in second-hand shops and the rest in abandoned houses in deserted villages. I've found these great old German army uniforms. I often have to boil the clothes I find before I can wear them. Sometimes school teachers who have received clothes for children from Western countries, that were in fact for grown ups, give those to me too.

How do you go about changing them?
I use screen-printing for the T-shirts, but usually I am impulsive, so I do them myself. I paint them on the floor, with my hand, with a paintbrush, anything. I use the cheapest car paint, that costs three euros, which allows me to wash the clothes as many times as I want and it still stays on. I use a lot of feminine elements. I am not bisexual or gay, but I do have a feminine side. I am not a metrosexual either, because I bite my nails but also because of my life rhythm – I swing between forest and city, going around in camouflage, full of mud or in suits accessorised with dolls. You are a hybrid between a metrosexual and a hippie. You are kind of cute.
So then why do women avoid me?

Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that you like sewing?
I read somewhere that the prophet Muhammad was a proficient sewer, and he had five wives. I can sew the most difficult material, like sack cloth. My mother does the technical stuff that I don’t know how to do, but only when she is in a good mood. Usually, as she is a delirious Roman-Catholic, she refuses to do stuff that goes beyond the quasi-normal things. Sometimes she does the clothes and then she thinks they are too extreme for her child to wear on the street, so she hides them around the house. She hides my clothes around the house. You can't begin to imagine how infuriating that is. She modifies them or she throws them away. I lost a lot of good stuff. What do people say about your clothes?
When I go out I take care not to overdo it so I don’t look like a clown. I never go out dressed solely in my own clothes, because they are too "showy". All my lovers said that I walk around like a madman, that I draw attention to myself. I also attract the police. Men think I am gay. Some people ask me for T-shirts but I never saw one of them wearing them. I gave a doctor a bag with a little bone attached to it as a present. He gave up wearing it because his colleagues were looking at him strangely. How do you accessorise?
I have two rings I always wear which I received from my mother, a silver one she gave me when I was 14 and a gold one at 18, because this is the tradition in the village I was born in. I make scarves from train curtains and anything else you can imagine. I make necklaces and bracelets, some of them macabre, with horse and pig teeth or cat jaws. Romania is full of corpses. I find the bones on my way through villages and forests. I have an eye for them. Corpses.

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