The project consists of an installation composed of two elements: a
life-size sculpture representing the preparation of a Smilodon
Populator, commonly known as a saber-toothed tiger, and behind it, a
painting representing a landscape.
The sculpture and
the painting are made of black recycled plastic garbage bags. Over
the last few years, starting from an artistic residence in India, I
have in fact developed a sculptural technique which consists in
pulling, burning and welding garbage bags until obtaining surfaces
full of formal and content suggestions, which refer to the fossil
tissue, to burnt skin, to environmental and nuclear catastrophes.
The composition of
the installation is inspired by the dioramas of museums of natural
history, in which the anatomic preparations or copies of extinct
animals are inserted in their original environmental context
recreated through scenographic and pictorial elements.
The Smilodon
populator is certainly the best known apex predator of the
Pleistocene. I chose to represent this animal because I see a strong
parallelism between its nature and that of contemporary man. Both are
at the top of the food pyramid of their ecosystem, both dominate over
other species.
However, the
extreme specialization of S. populator, combined with the climatic
changes of that era, caused its extinction. Its strengths, its
predatory behavior so efficient in a given environmental context,
revealed its weaknesses.
The S.populator has
lost its race for survival to species that are weaker but more able
to adapt to change.
Similarly the human
species, so efficient at changing its ecosystem to its supposed
advantage, is probably laying the foundations for its own extinction.
For the moment it
is still we human beings who put the remains of existing species on
display, looking at them with interest but also with a certain
superior detachment, in the firm belief that their fate cannot
concern us. We still feel like the superpradators of this era and
future ones.
But one distant day
it will perhaps be another species that will visit a museum to
observe the preparation of a human being and wonder how he lived and
what his habits were.
However, the
difference between us and the S.populator is enormous: we, apex
predators par excellence, have even managed to radically change our
environment to submit it to our purposes.
The consequences of
our actions - the waste of our domination of this planet - are
shedding the very skin of the earth.
Plastic, the most
distinctive sign of human production, is everywhere: there is no
longer any part of the surface that is free of microplastics and
plastic is starting to enter human tissues too.
The distinction
between natural and synthetic fades and it is not difficult to
imagine the new hybrid organisms of a future era, plastic skin and
muscles, fossil carbon polymers between the cells of our own flesh.
With Populator
I intend to generate in the viewer an awareness and a reaction that
start ex negativo from the dystopian vision of the end
of the Anthropocene, of a species that has not been able to maintain
a balance with its environment, arriving at degenerating it and even
changing itself.
With my artwork I
also aim to express the paradox that I see in the parallel between
the artistic product and non-biodegradable garbage. Both are
expressions of human culture that have reached the final stage of
elaboration, after which they must not or cannot be modified anymore.
But above all, both
continue to spread across the planet, filling places and changing the
surrounding environment, until time shuffles the cards, transforming
objects that we had thrown away into precious artifacts, witnesses of
an ancient culture that has disappeared, or transforming the remains
of works of art into fragments that we will set aside in new
landfills or on which we will build new museums. The same concept of
cultural value changes and dissolves in the very long period of the
cycle of reuse and disposal.
Working with
recycled garbage bags means addressing the theme of entropy from a
cultural point of view. By accepting the postulate that art, as a
very high cultural expression of a specific human being, can only be
preserved and therefore should not be recycled, the fate that awaits
it in a more or less distant future is paradoxically the definitive
disintegration.
On the other hand,
if we deny the value that is conventionally given to art, if we
consider it a simple temporary expression of human thought, and
therefore something that sooner or later will become garbage to be
recycled, we can reintegrate it into the continuous cycle of
disintegration and aggregation of matter.
It is therefore a
question of abandoning the individual and subjective perspective that
we have of art in favor of a perspective centered on the concept of
metamorphosis. T
To put it in the
words of Emanuele Coccia:
“metamorphosis - the phenomenon that allows the same life to
subsist in disparate bodies - is the
relationship that binds all species together and unites the living
with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they
are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human
species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it - the
same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to
exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and
the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a
carnival of the telluric substance of a planet - the Earth – that
continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the
smallest particle of its disparate body.
By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life,
the reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of
the human species as static and independent and to recognise instead
that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.”
