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SUPERFICIALIST TROTSKYITE HOMOSEXUALS

Antoine Capet is pretty good at creating stuff without any money. There's his magazine,

Entrisme

, and his electronic music workshop for disabled children, Atelier Mediterranee. He's also a self-taught tattooist who builds his own tattoo guns from old pens. Now that the artful, carefully considered tattoo is ubiquitous, having one done by a lunatic with a motorized Biro seems, to self-identified arty homo Parisians at least, like a radical thing to do.

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Vice: Hi Antoine. What is your magazine, Entrisme, about?

Antoine:

Me and my mates wanted invites to gigs, private parties, and free CDs, and didn't even know how or what we wanted the magazine to be about. It started with the name,

Entrisme

—you know, the Trotskyism infiltration technique. We wanted in on the Parisian scene and cultural institutions.

An arty homosexual

Didn't you say that Vice France doesn't like you? Is Entrisme some kind of wannabe Vice magazine?

Vice

France likes to make fun of us on their blog, saying that we're "boring arty homosexuals," but I like being an arty homosexual, and I'm definitely not bored.

So your tattoo blog is called "Supercialisme." What's that?

I already had more traditional, more elegant tattoos, but I always preferred the very naive tattoos inspired by South African gangs. Like with the magazine, we just thought the punk DIY approach was fun and easy. With most tattoo artists it's an ego fight—the guy wants to put his style on your arm—so I decided to buy a cheap machine to make my own tattoos. Superficialist tattoos should be superficial and spontaneous. I tattoo my buddies and they tattoo me.

To some people, superficialist tattoos might just look like really bad tattoos.

The big influence was the book

Homemade Tattoo Rules

by an Australian guy named Thomas Jeppe. That made me think that rudimentary tattoos could be something contemporary and weren't just for convicts.

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You even make your own equipment.

As a militant believer in DIY, it was obvious that I had to build my own machine. I made my first inking machine with the electric motor from a tape deck, and I used to tattoo my own leg to test the machines.

Would you call this a movement?

I'm not doing anything new, it's just that by talking about it, and giving it a daft name, people have become confident enough to have these sorts of tattoos again. Even after I tell people that I can't draw properly and that the final result is likely to be some sort of surprise, more and more people ask for one every week. Having your New York flight number tattooed on your arm on the plane to NYC is 10,000 times more relevant than having a classic Japanese sleeve tattoo with a carp. I don't have anything in common with a carp.

You've also got a band that you think fits into this philosophy "Mongolo noise"—what's that?

Well, Mongolo noise is a bit like the musical side of the superficialist tattoo art. I founded Atelier Mediterranee with the singer of the band Cheveu—it's an electronic workshop for mentally disabled children. We're actually going to put out a CD on Born Bad records. Often, mentally disabled people have this undomesticated, raw creative strength and are incredibly spontaneous because they're disabled—they just need help to succeed. I like the fact that they don't give a shit, they don't have references and are free, brutal, and weird. They don't pretend. DORA MOUTOT