Ettore Burdese, Italy in its purest form, sends us this interview at 04:33 in the morning from some airport in the middle of nowhere. Suffering through the hellish snoring of an obese person, according to Ettore Burdese, a member of ISIS. After 5 Bocks of beer at €2.75 each, he vomits up the following answers to our questions. You're like Christopher Columbus, you come from Genoa, but you're based in the Val Miñor... By any chance, are you a descendant of a certain Pedro Madruga? Columbus might not be from Genoa and perhaps he could actually have been Pedro Madruga. The only thing I'm clear about is that Pedro Madruga wasn't Italian; I don't see an Italian guy attacking in the early hours of the morning. If the guy came from Italy, he would have been called Beppe Aperitivo, attacking in the mid-afternoon with sunglasses and a speedo. I imagine that having been sponsored by Billabong while living in Italy is hard to achieve; did this allow you to travel a lot and venture into seas with more than half a meter of tidal range? On the contrary, it was easier; in '94 in Italy, you could win a competition just by tapping the board on the lip a couple of times. Something I found very funny when I met you was that you had a sign on your car that said "novice surfing" or something like that, right? That already defined a guy with attitude... hehe That wasn't me, but I wish it had been... Besides surfing on moving architecture, do you dedicate yourself a bit to static and landscape architecture? Yes, I'm an architect. I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is why I've returned to surfing. I have more free time than a retiree. Who would you go to a desert island with a point break all to yourself with, Miki Dora or Gabriel Medina? The times of Miki Dora were the pinnacle, from there surfing began its aesthetic and moral decline. It was all so perfect that, after completely losing the idiosyncrasy, the surfing world realized it and the Retro Movement started, but it was too late: Medina was already waxing his armpits and only the image of those times was recovered, like the Japanese do when they dress up like punks and sing Anarchy in the U.K. high on Fanta and Coke, before returning to the micro-apartment with their mothers. From there, surfing began its aesthetic and moral decline. The 4 horsemen of the apocalypse arrived to announce the end of surfing: bodyboarding, the Brazilians on the World Tour, SUP, and the schools. Before going in to surf, some school instructors make you do push-ups; if Miki Dora saw that, he would die all over again. But you also arrived in Galicia all "retro"... In 2004, I had spent a good while in Encinitas, where the R.M. was born, and I was enthusiastic. Surfers' conversations were more focused on surfing than on the boards (as always happens with the good ones). People studied vintage videos to understand how to use their bodies to turn those single fins, thus determining the style and not the other way around. Then the entire surfing world, vulgarized and lacking culture, watched Sprout and misinterpreted it: thousands of kooks bought their Bing and their vintage VW van, surfing as badly as always but imagining themselves to be cool as hell. For the line-ups, it was lethal; those wild boars who barely floated on their 6'2" x 17.25" x 2" thrusters switched to retro and started catching waves. It was better before, when they only adorned the line-ups with their sticker-covered boards. And the schools, there are very few where you live... On just one beach, there are 6 or 7 huge schools. Thousands of students every week. Analyzing the numbers, if only 1% of the students get hooked on surfing, in 5 years in Patos there will be 13,500 surfers at every peak. How do you like your beer, bitter or salty? I like it just the right amount of salty, and I'd like to salt half of Italy, like when the Joker planned to put LSD in the Gotham City aqueduct. Photography by Ziggyaction
