And then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability

Artists: Isaac Lythgoe, Petros Moris, Giulia Essyad, Nicolas Lamas, Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Grace Woodcock, Susi Gelb, Jennifer West, Daniela Corbascio, Yein Lee, Adham Faramawy, Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, Lucia Cristiani, Cyril Debon, Agnese Guido, Leilei Wu, Mariantonietta Bagliato, Pauline Julier, Ludovica Gugliotta, Pinar Marul, Pedro Barateiro, Élie Autin, Elena Eugeni, Bruno Giacchetti.

The project takes the form of a panorama structured by multiple sprawling connections that are never completely closed, capable of setting unexpected consequences in motion.

The artists have created works that are not just the end or purpose of a production process, but means, or tools that enhance the ability to imagine a space of multiform co-evolution, through which seeking culture in nature and vice versa, the contingent in the permanent, identity in difference and in which experimenting with new alliances and secondary paths that may not always lead to distant places but shift our point of view, allowing us to consider other possibilities.

The works in the show question the binarism separating humans and their cultures, nature and non-humans, phylogeny and ontogeny, genetic heritage, and technological alterations. A confusion caused by the impossibility of recognizing the identity signs of these paradoxical objects: without contours, without antithetical terms, without residues. Objects such that they can no longer simply be given in opposition to the human subject, but among which the human is involved and with which they share the same mesh and the same destiny. These viscous, matted, tentacled, and rhizomatic systems question the relationship between humans and non-humans by bringing them into a circular system of reciprocity. A mesh made of liquid, decentralized, gradual and intersubjective entities, in which each organism can only be defined in relation (although not the relation itself).

Instrumental reductionism finds fertile ground in the bio-capitalist mud in which we are enmeshed, it is based on the notion of is based on a notion of “human exceptionalism”, ethnocentric and speciesist and, from here, to the erection of a system founded on the opposition between nature and history, human and machine, male and female, identity and otherness, ecology and production, algorithms and neural connections, genetic heritage and technological alteration, rationality and instinct, mind and body, spirit and matter, real and virtual, true and false, organic and inorganic, biotic and abiotic, between a sense of responsibility and the idea of play, the environment in which we grow up and the genetic code, sharing and the sense of self, imagination and economy. In this game of doubles, each component of the “cognitive couple” is always dominated by its other, repressed and submissive half.

The project thus offers itself as a space intended for the harmony that is in the meeting of opposites, as a device through which experiencing a conception of the individual and his way of relating to reality no longer characterized by an excluding logic, but which on the contrary tends to include all modes of expression and areas of action.
Within these formal and mental paths there is also a critical dimension towards internalised, acquired and consolidated cognitive models; criticism that allows you to radically redefine the rules of any functional system, in order to use the rules in a different way, ignoring their original purpose.