Neapolitan street artist Jorit has his photo taken in Russia along with Putin

A photo together with Russian President Vladimir Putin that is bouncing all over the newspapers as well as on social media. It is the one taken yesterday by the Neapolitan street artist Jorit, born Ciro Cerullo, who flew to Russia to attend a youth forum in Soči. Among the Italians present were Ornella Muti and her daughter Naike Rivelli, who had their photo taken with Cerullo in front of the mural, executed in Soči itself, depicting the Roman actress. Jorit reportedly approached the Kremlin’s number one at the end of one of his speeches and asked, addressing Putin directly in English as a video attests, to take a picture with him “to show in Italy that you are human like everyone else, that the propaganda they are spreading everywhere is not real, that we are human and that we are all part of the human tribe.” And here they are, the two, photographed together, embracing. In the video, after the photo, you can see a beaming and jubilant Cerullo returning to his seat in the stands.

“Russia and Italy,” Putin said according to reports from Repubblica, “are united by many factors, including the struggle for independence and the desire for freedom that Italians always have in their hearts.” This is the second time within a few days that the Russian president has reiterated the closeness between Russia and Italy: the first was last Feb. 20, when he responded to an Italian student named Irene Cecchini praising the ties between the two countries. Cerullo, too, asked Putin during the Soči event whether, in his opinion, art could bridge Italy and Russia. “We have always been admired by Italian art,” Putin’s response according to Repubblica, “and it has always kept us close. Italian art is a great art of a great people, that much is clear. We in Russia have always considered it that way and we still consider it that way. Italy’s struggle for independence, Garibaldi, didn’t that unite us? This has always united us. Italians always have a desire for freedom in their hearts, and this means that you respect the desire of other peoples to make their own choices and choose their own destiny.”

Jorit had already made headlines for his closeness to Russia because of an affair that unfolded in Ukraine last summer. In fact, Cerullo executed, a few months ago, a mural in Russian-occupied Mariupol , which had raised criticism and earned the street artist a reputation as pro-Putin: it was a portrait of a little girl who wanted to communicate, according to Jorit’s words, “the suffering of the children of the Donbass who grew up for eight years under the bombs of Kiev and with the fear of the Nazi battalions.” For that work he had been accused of plagiarism by Austalian photographer Helen Whittle, specifically for basing the mural on a photograph of her daughter without asking permission. Already hundreds on social media are commenting on the photograph of Jorit and Putin, with many now asking Italian institutions (since Cerullo has often worked on commissions) to stop giving commissions to the artist.

Neapolitan street artist Jorit has his photo taken in Russia along with Putin

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