Ettore Burdese, Italy in its purest form, sends us this interview at 4:33 AM from some airport north of nowhere. Suffering from the infernal snoring of an obese person, according to Ettore Burdese, a member of ISIS. After 5 Bocks of beer at €2.75 each, he throws up the following answers to our questions.
You're like Christopher Columbus, you come from Genoa, but you're based in Val Miñor... By any chance, are you not a descendant of a certain Pedro Madruga?
Columbus might not be from Genoa and perhaps he could have actually been Pedro Madruga. The only thing I'm sure of is that Pedro Madruga wasn't Italian; I can't imagine an Italian 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 showing off.
I imagine that having been sponsored by Billabong while living in Italy is something difficult to achieve. Did this allow you to travel a lot and venture into seas with a greater tidal difference than 1/2 meter?
On the contrary, it was easier. In '94 in Italy, you could win a competition just by resting your board on the lip a couple of times.
Something that I found very funny when I met you is that you had a sign in your car that said "novice surfing" or something similar, right? That already defined a guy with attitude... heheh
It wasn't me, but I would have liked it to be...
Besides navigating on moving architecture, do you also dabble in static and landscape architecture?
Yes, I am 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 an empty point break with, Miki Dora or Gabriel Medina?
The times of Miki Dora were the pinnacle; from there, surfing began its aesthetic and moral decline. Everything was so perfect that, after completely losing its idiosyncrasy, the surfing world realized and the Retro Movement began, but it was already too late: Medina was already shaving his armpits and only the image of those times was recovered, as the Japanese do when they dress as punks and sing Anarchy in the U.K. hyped on Fanta and Coca-Cola, before returning to their micro-apartment with their mothers.
From there, surfing began its aesthetic and moral decline. The four horsemen of the apocalypse arrived to announce the end of surfing: bodyboarding, Brazilians on the World Tour, SUP, and surf schools. Before going surfing, some school instructors make you do push-ups; if Miki Dora saw that, he would die again.
But you also came to Galicia all retro...
In 2004, I had spent a good while in Encinitas, where the R.M. was born, and I was enthusiastic. Surfers' discussions were more focused on surfing than on boards (as is always the case with the good ones). People studied vintage videos to understand how they used their bodies to turn those single fins, thus determining the style and not the other way around.
Then the entire surfing world, vulgarized and without culture, saw Sprout and misinterpreted it: thousands of kooks bought their Bing and their vintage VW van, surfing badly as always but imagining themselves super cool. For the line-ups, it was lethal; those wild boars who poorly floated with their thrusters 6.2 x 17.25 x 2 switched to retro and started catching waves. 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 a single beach, there are 6 or 7 very large 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 each peak.
How do you like your beer, bitter or salty?
I like it with just the right amount of salt, and I'd like to salt half of Italy, like when the Joker planned to put LSD in Gotham City's aqueduct.
Photography by Ziggyaction
