Image credit: Normies Study Group, presenting OBJECTIFICATION. The intensive workshop takes place 10:00-16:30, Thursday 10 September, followed by the live body installation 21:15-22:45, Friday 11 September at UNCENSORED Festival. With Matilde Flor Usinger, Ruben R and workshop participants.

For Lidia Ravviso and Pia Grizzuti, pleasure is serious business – but never so serious that there isn’t room for play.

Filmmaker, intimacy coordinator and UNCENSORED founder Lidia Ravviso found her creative footing in Rome’s centri sociali, where politics, punk, art, queer culture and alternative communities collided. It was here that encounters with porn activists opened up the possibility of connecting sexuality with creative and political practice. Producer and co-director Pia Grizzuti arrived by a different route. Raised in a rural Christian environment where sexuality went largely unspoken, she began reconnecting with her body in her early thirties through kink, play, performance and workshops, eventually developing her own embodied practice through Barcelona’s Observatorio del Placer.

Their common ground is UNCENSORED: the London festival founded by Ravviso at the intersection of pornography, art and activism, now co-directed with Grizzuti. Returning for its fifth edition at Stück from 9-11 September, its expanding frame takes in explicit and non-explicit cinema, disability and desire, queer and trans representation, body politics, kink, censorship, consent and the slippery question of who gets to look – and who controls the image. Crucially, audiences aren’t confined to watching. Workshops including Adrián Coto’s Collective Uncensored Photography and Normies Study Group’s OBJECTIFICATION invite participation, experimentation and collective creation.

At a time when bodies and identities remain fiercely contested territory, UNCENSORED champions pleasure, agency, curiosity and creative freedom without pretending that representation alone equals liberation. As Lidia puts it beautifully: “Boundaries don’t necessarily make a creative space smaller. When they are genuinely understood and respected, they can make that space much bigger.”

So, get curious. Support queer and independent cultural spaces, seek out work made beyond the mainstream, question who gets represented and how – and leave room for joy while you’re doing it. Start by grabbing a ticket for UNCENSORED 2026, then join the festival mailing list and stay close to what Lidia, Pia and this growing community do next.

Let’s start with Lidia…

You’ve travelled from studying the Cinema of Transgression in Rome to filmmaking, adult cinema, intimacy coordination and founding UNCENSORED. Take us back to the beginning – what was young Lidia searching for creatively, and which encounters, films, people or acts of rebellion gave you permission to build a career outside the conventional route?

I discovered my passion for cinema very young, before I went to university, but I don’t think I ever saw cinema as something isolated from other art forms. I was always attracted to the places where different worlds meet – film, music, performance, politics, sexuality. That fascination was part of what drew me to the Cinema of Transgression. It wasn’t simply a film movement; it existed within a much wider underground culture, connected to punk and No Wave, performance and music, with figures such as Lydia Lunch moving between all these different worlds.

At the same time, I was very politically active in Rome and involved with the centri sociali – self-managed, occupied spaces historically important to Italian grassroots politics and counterculture. They were places where political activism, music, art, queer parties, debates and alternative forms of community could coexist. Through that world I encountered porn activism and people such as Slavina, with whom I made my first explicit short film, and Diana Pornoterrorista, among many others.

That was probably a fundamental encounter for me, because I realised there was a space where sexuality, creativity and political practice could genuinely meet. I felt an urgency to connect creative work with the political questions I cared about, particularly freedom of expression and what I would now call the politics of pleasure.

I wouldn’t necessarily describe my journey as an act of rebellion, or even as a conscious decision to build a career outside the conventional route. I was simply following what interested me and the people and spaces where I felt the most intellectually and creatively alive. I also met some of the most extraordinary people in my life through those worlds.

From there, one thing led quite organically to another. My interest in how intimacy and sex are represented on screen led me further into adult cinema – particularly pornography with cinematic ambitions and production values – and eventually into intimacy coordination.

Looking back, these might appear to be different practices or moments of my life and career, but to me they have always been connected by the same questions: how we represent bodies, intimacy and desire, who gets to represent them, and how we can create freely while also thinking about care, agency and consent.

Image Credit: Lidia Ravviso, Founder and Co-Director of Uncensored.

When we interviewed you at UNCENSORED’s first edition in 2019, pornography, art and activism sat at the heart of the conversation. Seven years later, the programme seems to have opened into a much broader investigation of intimacy, pleasure, bodies and human connection. Has UNCENSORED changed, or has contemporary culture simply moved closer to questions you were already asking?

I think both things have happened. UNCENSORED has definitely evolved, but the questions at its core haven’t changed so radically. From the beginning, pornography was never interesting to me simply as pornography. It was a lens through which we could talk about bodies, desire, representation, censorship, power, intimacy and, of course, pleasure.

What has changed is that the lens has opened up. Our International Open Call is not limited to explicit cinema. We want to create a dialogue between explicit and non-explicit films and look at the different ways filmmakers are representing intimacy, vulnerability, desire and human connection. For me, that doesn’t mean moving away from the original identity of UNCENSORED. It means expanding the conversation that was already there.

At the same time, I do think contemporary culture and cinema have moved closer to some of these questions. There is much more public conversation now around consent, different gazes, body autonomy, queer and trans representation, disability, sex work, and who has the right to tell particular stories. These questions have entered cinema and cultural discourse much more visibly than they had when we started in 2019.

But I also think we have to be careful with the idea that greater visibility automatically means greater freedom or progress. We are living through a moment in which conversations around sexuality and identity are more visible, while censorship and restrictions around sexual expression are also becoming increasingly present. So perhaps UNCENSORED has broadened, but its purpose remains very similar: to create a space where we can look critically at how intimacy, bodies and pleasure are represented, and at the politics behind those representations.

Image Credit: Image credit: Normies Study Group, presenting OBJECTIFICATION. The intensive workshop takes place 10:00-16:30, Thursday 10 September, followed by the live body installation 21:15-22:45, Friday 11 September at UNCENSORED Festival. With Matilde Flor Usinger, Ruben R and workshop participants.

This year’s two Politics of Pleasure on Screen conversations bring together questions around disability, trans and feminist gazes, consent, censorship, authorship and body politics. “Pleasure” can sound wonderfully uncomplicated, yet who gets to experience it, represent it and be recognised as desirable is deeply political. What does pleasure tell us about power in 2026?

I think pleasure tells us a lot about power precisely because we tend to imagine it as something private and uncomplicated. But who is allowed to experience pleasure, whose body is recognised as desirable, whose desire can be visible, and who is allowed to represent themselves are profoundly political questions.

We are living through very difficult times, where we can see power being increasingly invasive in areas of our lives that should be deeply personal: our bodies, our identities, our sexuality and our desires. If we look, for example, at what is happening around trans rights and legislation in the UK, we can see how political and institutional power can directly affect people’s ability to live and express their identities freely.

For me, pleasure is also an extension of identity and self-expression. Being able to express our desires, to experience our bodies on our own terms, and to see ourselves represented without being censored or reduced to stereotypes is part of personal freedom.

And representation is also about who has historically had the power to look and who has been looked at. BIPOC bodies, disabled bodies, trans and queer bodies, sex workers, kinky bodies and bodies that exist outside conventional standards of beauty have often been excluded from representations of desire or, on the contrary, hypersexualised, fetishised and represented through somebody else’s gaze. So it isn’t simply a question of making different bodies visible. It’s also about authorship and agency: who is behind the camera, who is constructing the image, and whether people have the possibility to represent their own bodies, desires and pleasure on their own terms.

And I think it’s important not to romanticise (our) pornography itself as a completely liberated space. The porn industry has its own limits in terms of representation, particularly when it comes to bodies and body diversity. It can reproduce many of the same standards of desirability, beauty, gender and race that exist in mainstream culture. There is still a lot of work to do within pornography itself, and this is one of the reasons why independent and alternative forms of adult cinema are so important to us.

This is also why different gazes are so central to the conversations we’re having at UNCENSORED. Representation doesn’t automatically become empowering simply because a marginalised body appears on screen. We also need to ask who is telling the story, who controls the image, and from what position.

Perhaps that’s what pleasure tells us about power in 2026: the personal and the political are still completely intertwined. The freedom to experience and represent pleasure on our own terms cannot be taken for granted, and creating spaces where different bodies, desires and gazes can exist without having to justify themselves remains incredibly important.

Image Credit: Still from Moments, directed by altSHIFT. The film will be screened as part of Intimacy Unbound, 19:00-20:50, Wednesday 9 September at UNCENSORED Festival.

Adrián Coto’s photography workshop culminates in members of the public collectively creating an explicit tableau vivant, with you facilitating the consent-led framework as an intimacy coordinator. For some participants, this may be completely new territory. How can putting communication, care and the freedom to change your mind at the heart of the process create greater possibilities for experimentation and self-expression?

For me, consent isn’t the opposite of experimentation; it’s what makes experimentation possible.

A good example is Adrián Coto’s photography workshop at UNCENSORED, which I will facilitate as an intimacy coordinator. Adrián is a Venezuelan visual artist and photographer, and the workshop will culminate in creating a collective explicit photograph, something almost like a pornographic tableau vivant.

The participants will be members of the general public, some of whom may have never experienced this kind of creative process before.

Adrián will lead the artistic and photographic process, while my role will be to help create and maintain a consent-led framework, checking in with participants and paying attention to how people are feeling emotionally, physically and psychologically throughout the experience.

Consent in this context isn’t simply about asking “yes or no”; it’s an ongoing process of communication, negotiation and the possibility of changing your mind.

I think when creativity exists within a clearly negotiated framework, there can actually be much more space for self-expression and experimentation. You know that your boundaries will be heard, that you can communicate when something doesn’t feel right, and that your agency is part of the creative process. That can give people the confidence to explore something they might otherwise never explore.

For me, this is also about putting human connection, care and respect at the centre of artistic practice. Boundaries don’t necessarily make a creative space smaller. When they are genuinely understood and respected, they can make that space much bigger.

Image Credit: Still from I Want You to Write a Novel in My Eye, directed by Marc Blackie. The film will be screened as part of Uncensored Narratives, 19:00-20:45, Thursday 10 September at UNCENSORED Festival.

Uncensored Narratives and Radical Desire move through butch desire, queer masculinity, trans bodies, fetish, BDSM, sex work, surveillance, fantasy and unconventional relationships, often with considerable humour and playfulness. Are there still forms of sexuality or bodies that contemporary culture struggles to look at without either sensationalising them or trying to make them respectable?

Absolutely. I think contemporary culture has become much better at accommodating difference, but often only when that difference can be made palatable or respectable. There is still discomfort with desires, bodies and relationships that refuse to explain themselves, behave properly or fit into recognisable categories.

What I love about many of the films in Uncensored Narratives and Radical Desire is that they don’t necessarily ask for acceptance. There is humour, awkwardness, explicitness, kink, tenderness and sometimes contradiction. They allow people to be complex rather than turning them into either a spectacle or a positive representation.

Image credit: Still from CUMRAGS, directed by Blade, Bunnydrone Studios (2025).

Give us three cultural places in London you’d happily send a Run Riot reader to – a cinema, club, gallery, bookshop, performance space, community hub or somewhere far stranger. What makes each one important to you, and who would you like us to go there and support?

I would start with The Arzner LGBTQIA+ Cinema in Bermondsey. I co-programmed the London Fetish Film Festival there earlier this year, and I fell in love with the space and the people behind it. Having a cinema dedicated to queer film and culture in London is incredibly important, particularly at a time when independent cultural spaces are struggling. Go there, watch films and support them.

Then The Common Press, an independent queer and intersectional bookshop and community space with a nice cafe/bar. I love places that aren’t simply about consuming culture but create opportunities for people to meet, exchange ideas and build community. They champion queer and underrepresented writers and have created something that goes far beyond simply being a bookshop.

And New River Studios in Manor House. I have a particular affection for it because it reminds me of the old squats and centri sociali I knew in Italy. It’s a venue where you can rehearse and make music, see a gig, have a cheap pizza and a drink, or simply spend time during the day. London desperately needs more spaces where you don’t feel that every minute of your presence has to be monetised.

I would also mention Klub Verboten and Stück, which are obviously very close to me. Klub Verboten has been organising fetish parties in London for around ten years, building not only a large and incredibly diverse queer community but also developing a strong practice around consent and creating safer spaces for exploring kink and sexuality. That experience eventually expanded beyond nightlife. Klub Verboten gave life to Stück, the space that is now also hosting UNCENSORED. I am Head of Cultural Programme there, where part of my work is developing a programme of workshops that creates bridges between kink and other practices – from movement and somatics to holistic and artistic practices. What interests me is precisely that possibility of taking some of the knowledge, experimentation and community that developed within kink culture and allowing it to meet completely different disciplines and audiences.

I’m actually not a huge gallery person. I often prefer encountering exhibitions in unconventional or temporary spaces – something more nomadic, where the context itself becomes part of experiencing the work.

Image Credit: Pia Grizzuti, Co-director and Producer of Uncensored. Photographed by Venus Raven.

Enter Pia…

Pia, your path towards UNCENSORED moves through documentary production, experimental film, fetish culture, performance, visual art and Barcelona’s Observatorio del Placer. Before all of that, who were you in your twenties – and when did you first realise that sexuality, the body and pleasure could become serious material for creative exploration?

I was still very much the shy person shaped by my upbringing in my twenties: living mostly in my head and feeling totally disconnected from my own body. I was raised in a rural Christian context where sexuality simply wasn’t something you could speak about or learn about openly, whether as a practice or an orientation.

I always sensed I had a healthy sexual appetite, but I didn’t have language or permission to explore it.

The shift came in my early thirties, when I began a real journey of exploration, starting with play parties, kink events and workshops. It was through these spaces that I started reconnecting with my body, with playfulness, with pleasure.

Quite quickly I felt there was more to discover beyond what’s commonly understood as sex; that sexuality is intrinsically linked to relating, to body politics, to identity, and that this could be explored through other practices too, like performance and bodywork. Berlin’s scene was a real source of inspiration, and from there I started developing my own work: research that became immersive experiences, performances, play spaces, workshops and art residencies. Observatorio del Placer became the project that held all of these practices together most consistently.

Image Credit: Image credit: Still from Onanism or my trans body makes me so fucking horny, directed by brutalisturinal. The film will be screened as part of Intimacy Unbound, 19:00-20:50, Wednesday 9 September at UNCENSORED Festival.

One of the striking things about UNCENSORED 2026 is that audiences aren’t only being invited to watch. Adrián Coto’s Collective Uncensored Photography workshop asks participants to write, move, collaborate and create explicit images together. What becomes possible when the audience stops being a spectator and starts sharing responsibility for making the work?

I think hierarchical ways of looking at things (the facilitator and the participant, the image and the viewer) follow this very binary logic. It’s important to engage in practices that blur that line between who’s doing what, especially around sex.

The purpose is a different kind of learning: an experiential type of learning. Not just learning about a practice or technique, but learning by doing, by immersing yourself in the interaction itself. It’s an experiment in co-creation. This is something we try to make happen throughout the festival in more subtle ways too. We’re all part of creating the experience.

And that’s powerful because everyone comes with their own inner world and their own experiences. Combining those experiences in a participatory way opens things up to multiplicity. In researching sexuality, and in research more broadly, it’s so important to have an approach with an expansive quality, one that doesn’t keep the topic static. Where learning stays open rather than fixed, a space for experimentation.

I think this is one way to move beyond rigid understandings of sexuality and open up to different possibilities, which might help remove stigma and taboo around something that is intrinsically human.

Image Credit: Image credit: Still from Courage for (un-disabled) lust, directed by Ben Nordmann. The film will be screened as part of Intimacy Unbound, 19:00-20:50, Wednesday 9 September at UNCENSORED Festival.

Normies Study Group’s OBJECTIFICATION takes a word normally associated with exploitation and turns it into an embodied investigation of care, desire, vulnerability, power and play, eventually becoming a live body installation made with participants. What interested you in complicating the idea of objectification rather than simply rejecting it?

The whole point of doing this is to question that immediate reaction people might have: that objectification is intrinsically bad, something that shouldn’t be expressed. The wider concept, NORMAL, which is a project that started at Observatorio del Placer and that I’m actively involved in, exists exactly to question what normality is, what our conventional understanding of something is, and to imagine collectively something else. We explore this through body-based research, which then culminates in a performance that is usually interactive, blurring the line between audience and participants.

With objectification specifically, it’s enough to stop for a second to realise that yes, it can be something unwanted and at the same time, there are contexts where it becomes play. In kink, for example, objectification can be a source of playfulness and pleasure between consenting adults. We can also transpose objectification into a more playful and imaginative realm. What if our bodies became furniture? What if our bodies became something that could simply be used? Isn’t there also a sense of relief in letting go of agency within a certain container?

I think it’s important to open up those questions, because they allow for a more nuanced understanding of what certain things mean: to expand our view rather than reduce it to black and white. It’s not an attempt to deny the understanding that immediately comes to mind. But if we give ourselves the time to imagine other meanings and explore other possibilities of what something could be, then things we assume are simply bad or simply good suddenly open up: the possibilities become endless. There’s space for imagination, and space for a less rigid understanding, especially when it comes to topics that could be perceived as controversial.

Image Credit: Image credit: Adrián Coto. Collective Uncensored Photography – Photography and Creative Practice for Collective Self-Knowledge through Uncensored Storytelling takes place 14:00-17:00, Wednesday 9 September at UNCENSORED Festival.

Your work with Observatorio del Placer has explored sexuality through ideas including fluid identity, transformation and embodied experience. UNCENSORED similarly brings together people whose bodies, desires and relationships refuse neat categories. Do you think the most interesting conversations around sexuality now begin when we stop asking people to define themselves quite so rigidly?

Absolutely. I think the only way to imagine new possibilities is by allowing at least some degree of fluidity, because that leaves space for something else.

That doesn’t mean completely detaching from any kind of identification. It means understanding that we’re not just one thing. Especially when it comes to pleasure and sexuality, this is something very dynamic, as dynamic as our identity is. It’s important to acknowledge this, so we don’t get stuck with rigid ideas of what we think sexuality is, or what we like, what we dislike, what’s acceptable, what isn’t.

It’s about maintaining a fluid and, at the same time, very curious attitude: constantly questioning, constantly reassessing, with curiosity and without judgment. I apply this to my own exploration of sexuality, my current journey through gender and, more broadly, to the way I understand reality.

Image credit: Still from It’s My Party and I’ll Cum If You Let Me, directed by Felix Mufti. The film will be screened as part of Radical Desire, 19:00-20:45, Friday 11 September at UNCENSORED Festival.

There’s a lovely collision of seriousness and mischief across this year’s programme – disability and bodily autonomy sit alongside leather, camp, kinky humour, queer romance, volcanoes, cybersex and wonderfully unruly fantasies. When you’re curating UNCENSORED, how important is joy? Can having fun itself become a form of resistance?

Joy can be a form of resistance. I think, especially in the current climate, it’s important to hold onto that. This isn’t new; there’s a whole movement around pleasure activism, and the importance of reclaiming pleasure, reclaiming joy, especially in a world that wants us numb, that can feel hopeless. That shouldn’t be read as not taking political responsibility, or as denial through escapism. It’s more that joy becomes a form of resistance, a way of finding hope and aliveness in a world that can sometimes feel grim and doomed.

This has come through a lot of my work over the past few years. A big element of Observatorio del Placer, for example, was creating that kind of realm: a space of experimentation where we could reclaim joy. And in that intentional reclaiming of joy, we could also tap into things that feel less comfortable, such as our own mortality. There’s a misconception that joy is just laughter. Joy is more about aliveness standing up to something that tells you to kneel down and give up.

Even the work that eventually became sexological bodywork, which I’m currently training in, has its roots in practices that emerged in part as a way to reclaim pleasure and connection during the AIDS epidemic.

Image Credit: Image credit: Still from Our Joyful Endings, directed by La Fille Renne. The film will be screened as part of Radical Desire, 19:00-20:45, Friday 11 September at UNCENSORED Festival.

We’d also love your three London cultural recommendations. Which places feel special to you personally – perhaps somewhere that nurtures experimentation, introduces you to unexpected people or simply gives you a brilliant night out – and what would you like Run Riot readers to discover there?

My favourite one at the moment is Love Affair Basement (LAB), an amazing queer space with an incredible, very eclectic programme. It’s run by two amazing people, and it has this real sense of community. The programme covers all sorts: drag king shows, good music, erotic and fetish nights, and everything in between. The people running LAB also run a lovely little café just above called A Portuguese Love Affair, so if you go to one, treat yourself to the other too: give yourself (and them!) some love.

And finally, more than a space, there’s a project I’ve been collaborating with called Altered Image Fest, which happens in different venues. They’re currently developing a collaboration with a new venue, Iklektic, where they’re also starting to hold more events. It’s a really lovely, independently organised festival that happens once a year: a mix of beautiful short experimental films alongside music and performances.

Find Lidia at lidiaravvisostudio.com and on Insta @lidiarav_

Find Pia on LinkedIn.

See their work → uncensoredfest.co.uk and on Insta @uncensored_fest

UNCENSORED Festival 2026
5th Edition
9–11 September
Stück
32-36 Tottenham Rd
London N1 4DW

Online Screenings on PinkLabel.TV
19th November – 3rd December 2026

Info & Tickets → uncensoredfest.co.uk