Opening: Wednesday, October 22th, 6.30 pm
The exhibition Invocations. Becoming Animal, presented within the fifth edition of BIENALSUR, is part of a widespread curatorial project that analyzes the relationship between the human body and non-human bodies in the world we inhabit. The guiding concept is the term "Invocations," drawn from a lecture by James Hillman in which the psychoanalyst describes invocation as a call to invisible spirits, that implies a shift of the human subject from the center of the scene "toward the wings (the sides), in an anti-modern gesture that ignores the ego, the hero, intentions, and the biography of the person."
In line with this decentralization, the exhibition at Fabbrica del Vapore proposes the abandonment of the human perspective and a simultaneous process of mutation and hybridization with other animal species. Through a variety of media, the artists in the exhibition explore the potential of a sympathetic encounter between humans and animals, the outcome of which questions the very essence of being human. The term “becoming” indeed implies the renunciation of identity certainties and the exposure to a contamination with the non-human other, considered as a subject capable of producing worldviews.
The body, in its sensory dimension, is invoked as a territory of investigation - a body ready to abandon the human prerogatives expressed through posture, gaze, or speech. In some cases, the artists propose hypotheses of fusional contact or hybridization between bodies, which move, observe, and explore the world as if they were cetaceans, reptiles, or birds. There are also perspectives that critically investigate the human desire to dominate and domesticate animals, considered passive objects of one-way affection. The exhibited works question the dominant speciesist hierarchies that tend to relegate non-human species to a subordinate position, denying them the possibility of asserting themselves as active subjects in the development of non-anthropocentric thought.
This exhibition is a co-production of BIENALSUR and Fondazione Garuzzo.
Image: Valentina Furian, Centauro, 2024