Biography
We are Niccolò Benetton and Simone Santilli, founders of Milan/Chiampo based The Cool Couple; we make communication projects through images.
Our biggest shortcoming is the desire to do things in a different way, in order to bring ideas out of schools and institutions to help people improve their critic conscience.
The idea that led us to create, in late 2012, TCC came from our deep friendship (we met in Milan while attending the MA) and few odd habits we share.
As a hobby we grow dreams.
Sometimes The Cool Couple has success in turning the projects discussed in the studio into strong photographs, large schemes, hand-drawings or well-crafted videos. In this case you have an artwork; for rejected ideas we have a waste-bin which works perfectly as basket.
The challenge we face daily is dealing with words and pictures, starting from what the visual everydayness adds to the way you look and think. We do commercial and editorial work too. As other human beings we need to eat, breathe, drink and have sex to reproduce the species.
Niccolò lives in Chiampo and studied philosophy before going to Milan to get the MA in photography and visual design at the FORMA foundation. Then he went to Paris to work with Thomas Mailaender; in the meanwhile, he developed some personal projects and took part at the Mountain Photo Festival artist-in-residence.
Simone lives in Milan, where he works with the artist Francesco Jodice and teaches visual culture at NABA university. He has studied semiothics and contemporary art in Venice and earned the MA at the FORMA foundation in 2011.
