"Beautiful, why don't you put on an exhibition?"

Rosanna Gaeta, of the Libreria La Maria del Porto bookshop in Trani, asked me that on a hot summer afternoon, in my office. She was looking at some of my work. I burst out laughing. I wasn't laughing a few weeks later, on opening day. I was so overwhelmed by anxiety that I didn't show up to my own exhibition.

MISCELLANEA gathered graphic and photographic works built with digital processing, strong chromatic contrasts, a path through human feelings and their contrasting vitality. It was 1996. Digital media were only just beginning to enter the work of people who made images, and I was already in it up to my neck.

I produced all the works on show, graphic, photographic and digital, and handled the staging of the exhibition, at the Libreria La Maria del Porto in Trani.

My first exhibition happened because someone else saw something in my work before I saw it myself. I didn't turn up to the opening out of anxiety, and yet everything else started from there. Sometimes the important things begin by chance, and you aren't even in the room when it happens.

Digital metamorphoses and Cibachromes by Gaetano Armenio in a pitch-dark room: each visitor got a torch and a lavender sweet. Terlizzi, 2001.

I had visitors walk into a room that was completely dark. To each of them I handed two things, a pocket torch and a lavender-flavoured sweet. The works revealed themselves one at a time, inside the beam of light, without knowing what to expect at the next step. I wanted the images to emerge slowly, with the tension that comes when you do not see everything at once.

BILICO was an exhibition of digital metamorphoses, large-format Cibachrome and video-graphics, at a time when digital techniques were only just entering photographic work. A hypnotic video ran alongside the route and set the rhythm at which you moved between light and shadow. The theme was the border between visible and invisible, and the darkened setting staged it before the photographs themselves.

I made the photographs, the digital processing, the video-graphics and the setup of the entire exhibition. The venue was the Galleria d'arte RA in Terlizzi.

An exhibition is not only what you hang on the wall. At BILICO the experience began in the dark, with a torch in hand. The photographs were the same for everyone, but each person discovered them in their own order, at their own pace. It was the first time I understood how much it matters how you let people into a room, not just what you put inside it.

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Magritte's Lovers remade with Parma ham instead of the white cloth. A work by Gaetano Armenio for the Pesce d'Aprile group show, Bari 2003.

It was April Fools' Day, and I meant it. I remade Magritte's "The Lovers" with Parma ham in place of the white cloth, and underneath that slice of cured meat covering the face was me. The title does the rest of the work, "The Lover of Parma".

The piece was made for "Pesce d'Aprile" (April Fool), a contemporary art group show held, not by chance, on the first of April 2003. The date was already a statement of intent. The whole show played on irony and self-irony toward contemporary art and its system, and quoting Magritte only to swap his enigmatic cloth for something off a deli counter was my way of mocking the solemnity with which art so often speaks about itself. Using a slice of ham to say love, representation, identity.

I conceived and produced the photographic work "The Lover of Parma", shown at Galleria Spazio IKONOS in Bari.

What I learned. Contemporary art sometimes takes itself too seriously. "The Lover of Parma" was there to remind me, and whoever was looking, that a serious thing can be said even with Parma ham over your face. Irony takes nothing away from the work. Often it is what makes it stick.

A large-format cibachrome for the Vergine d'Oliva group show on the Mediterranean olive. Pinacoteca Provinciale, Bari, and the European Parliament, 2003.

My VERGINE D'OLIVA (Virgin of the Olive) is a frontal, mirrored face, split into two halves facing each other like an icon. The green background in vertical stripes recalls the light filtered through the leaves of an olive grove. A wooden, phallic-shaped element brings the masculine alongside the Marian icon, in a deliberate short circuit between the sacred, sexuality and the earth. I worked on the point of contact between modernity and tradition, and the devotional title pulled one way while the subject pulled the other.

The work is a large-format Cibachrome I made in 2003 for a contemporary art group show with Italian and international artists. The theme was the olive as a cultural, spiritual and social symbol of the Mediterranean. The olive was the common thread, and each artist read it through their own language.

The group show had two venues. The Pinacoteca Provinciale di Bari (the provincial art gallery), from 31 May to 30 June 2003, and the European Parliament in Strasbourg, from 6 December 2003 to 6 January 2004. The large format of the Cibachrome held together two distant things, the devotional echo of the title and the material rootedness of the subject.