“June 2024, I get a call: “Hi, I’m (…) from the X Factor editorial team, we saw your new video clip “Billie Eilish” and I wanted to ask you why you didn’t sign up”. This is how the story of Claudia Ottavia, a 36-year-old Sardinian singer, begins, with a dream: to be able to make one of her songs known to the general public.
Claudia arrives in Rome for the first auditions and proposes her work, “Billie Eilish”, “with all the emotion that a singer-songwriter can feel in bringing her own song”, she comments. The singer overcomes the first obstacle and is called for the auditions with her song. “So I organize the trip with the family, including the grandmother to take care of Giulio (more than €1000 of expenses)”.
“Day 1: soundcheck from 7 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon. They exploit us to shoot all the commercials in the world: chocolates, cars. Day 2: from 10 in the morning locked in a room. At 23 audition. I enter, despite the tiredness, happy to do my performance. In front of me 4 judges who laugh, laugh, laugh and that’s it. I had given everything, I was paralyzed. They don’t comment on my performance, they have nothing to say and they pass the ball. Constructive comments for my artistic path? 0. Superficiality, 1000”.
“Exploited to gain an audience. Bullying. Luckily I’m 36 and have the tools to overcome the experience, even though there’s a part of me that’s still very naive, that doesn’t want to believe that something so bad exists. But imagine a 16-year-old mocked for one of the things he loves to do most, in front of all of Italy, what does he do?”. Here, this was my experience at the X Factor 2024 auditions″.
If there were more opportunities for artists, especially Sardinians, to express themselves, more occasions, a real ground on which to build, without necessarily aspiring to become famous, but having the possibility to do what we like, more often. Then maybe these talents would lose all their power and we would stop prostituting ourselves”, concludes the singer bitterly.
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