Issue #143
Simone Nobili
Il Frammento
Simone Nobili has lived and worked in 8 cities, in 4 countries and across 2 continents. His career launched at J.W. Thompson Rome and evolved at Leo Burnett Milan. In 2005, he was invited by Jung Von Matt Hamburg to join the international task force called JVM/9. The task force was a 24/7 creative factory, and the first of its kind, comprised of 12 creatives handpicked from all around the world. In 2006 Simone joined TBWA/Worldwide as Creative Director. He worked at TBWA New York, Los Angeles and London, leading creative and supervising teams in Paris, Dublin and Madrid. In 2014 he was recruited by Chuck McBride as creative leader on Google and Ubisoft. His journey as Creative Director continued at AKQA San Francisco where he led the Nvidia, Activision and Levi Strauss accounts and helped the agency win their first ever Gold Lion in the Cyber category. In 2018 Simone took the role of Creative Director at Kastner LA (Red Bull agency), where he’s in charge of guiding creative and mentoring young teams. He’s the founder of Plus 1, an open-source art tank that fosters openness and co-founder of OrangeVest, a nonpartisan international movement to help migrants and refugees. He considers himself a true citizen of the world, holding double citizenship and living the dream.
I write. I take notes. I piece together ideas. I lace up moments. I tear up my thoughts and if it’s my lucky day I make them into a well-built line that releases a spark, or a poem that walks somewhere, or a script that gets produced, or an event that takes over the city. I’ve been working as a Creative Director for the past 12 years, from Milan to Hamburg, from New York to London, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I use my work to dig fun out of my days. It’s an excavation process. It travels deep inside. Sometimes it’s painful, uncomfortable, troubled. But it is never dull. This is what makes it vibrant.
Italy is all over me, and inside me. It is who I am. I don’t believe I truly left Italy. I just happened to shift the axis of my world and so my existence now unfolds on different coordinates. Los Angeles came out of the cartogram of my destiny. People who knew me could tell you that it was statistically certain that one day I would have crossed the ocean and steered west. I broke a few dreams before touching down in the City of Angels, but it was all worth it.
There’s not just a single memory. There are fragments of memories that recompose themselves every time I let my mind run backwards. There’s the face of the girl who became my wife, the sky over Sunset Boulevard, the sand of Topanga Beach, an M2 Buell Cyclone ripping through Pacific Coast Highway, the last cigarette smoked in Santa Monica, a clock reading 5AM, everything and all. Time is a hoarder that rents minds without a contract.
My outfit is dictated by the way I move through the city. I commute on my Harley. Combat boots and a leather jacket are essential. The jacket I am wearing was made for the 60th anniversary of the movie “The Wild One”, with Marlon Brando. You can see the skull and pistons logo on the back of the jacket, crowned by the letters B.R.M.C (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club). Johnny’s (Marlon) coarse personality in the movie defined an entire generation. When a local girl asked him, “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?”, he answered “What’ve you got?”. I always thought that that was one of the best lines ever written in Hollywood.
It’s an open platform. It’s a gate that shows you that we are bound by nothing. Whenever life draws you a line, we are faced with two choices: either we step over or we hold back. The people portrayed on this site stepped over. I am one of them.
My words and my ideas are my ambassadors. The way I construct a sentence, the process I use to lay out consonants and vowels, the switches I turn to activate a brainstorm carries my Italian DNA.
