| A poacher's landscape. Samuel S. Bowser, Cell Biologist: “The creatures that are down there, they are like science fiction creatures, they're arranged in a way that they would gabble you up, from slime type blobs, but creepier than classic science fiction blobs. These would have long tentacles and would insnare you and as you try to get away from them, you just become more ensnared by your own actions. And then after you would be frustrated and exhausted, then this creature would sort of move in and take you apart. So that's one example of one of the creatures. Then there other types of worms, types of things with horrible mandibles, jaws and just bits to rend your flesh. It really is a violent, a horribly violent world that is obscure to us because we are encased in neoprene and we are much larger than that world. So it doesn't really affect us, but if you would shrink down, miniaturized in that world, it would be a horrible place to be, just horrible.”
Werner Herzog, Director:”And this is a world earlier than human beings. Do you think that the human race and other mammals fled in panic from the oceans and crawled on solid land to get out of this?”
S.S.B.:”Yeah, I think undoubtedly that's exactly the driving force that caused us to leave the horrors behind. To grow and evolve unto a larger creature to escape what is horribly violent at the miniature scale, miniaturized scale. Yeah.”
Nothing more than violence and horror. An escape from the darkness of the ocean's abyss, from the nightmares that lurk unseen. Surviving at any cost with the only rule that the one who shall succumb is not me. It is possible to see this mark on any human activity, even when morale tries to deny it and to deceive ourselves we call it with different names, like art or science. Art is ultimately a form of necrology, a childish attempt to survive the unsurvivable, so that at least the name will be still there after all. A name written in the collective memory, with the guess that memory won't die. Being bigger not to be eaten, shouting our name stronger hoping the echo would last forever. Depicting, writing, sculpting, freezing in a dead like status things that are no longer in time, that are gone. Of the luckiest moments what is left are these mummies, while the others are forgotten and lost is their memory. The illusion of creating life, which is the ultimate unconfessed goal of any art and medicine, is the ultimate consequence of the same feeling. The landscape around us, defined by art in different ways, at the end has suffered the same doom of dissection to possess it and make it our. To pretend it was meant by us. To master beauty, the ultimate metaphor of life as death is the ultimate image of desperate ugliness and loneliness. Dissected by science, to deceive death, to try to understand its arithmetic and have it give a different result. Kill another specie to grasp the secret of life for your own is a technically complex translation of slaying to survive. This feeling lead us, despite all the formalities, and presents itself in all his unaltered rawness when we sense death is near. Definitely staring into something else's dead eyes is an efficient way to feel alive.
“Still Alive” starts exactly at this point. Is a series of ten images of animals preserved with taxidermy, from various natural history museums. The eyes have been taken off from the images and in a bowl that completes the work there are twenty roughly made balls of plaster and wax. There is the staging of life, justified by science with the purpose of study and dissertation, and by art by the research of beauty. The skin becomes the mask of a disappeared body, as if it is sufficient to maintain the being into the world of the livings. There is the grace of the form, hiding death and dissection, for our benefit at he expense of the other species. There are the empty eyes of the believers in plastic surgery, where an appearance of life is pretended despite the natural decay of our body. As if the exterior grants a value also to an empty interior. There is the desperate attempt of art of depicting down to the tiniest details, pretending to compete with life, while producing a clumsy skin puppet. There is the Leatherface belief of living the life of whom's face you wear as a mask. But still the eyes would be missing.
“Quasi Vivi” which tranlates in “Almost Alive” is the main project from which “Still Alive” is derived. It is an nonscientific reconnaissance of Natural History Museums collections. It features more than 6000 images from London, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Kassel, Muenster, Florence, Bologna, Tucson, San Diego and Los Angeles. It is failing attempt to document the as well failing attempt to catalog any living form that started with illuminism and guided the scientific method since then, until science realized it was an impossible goal due to the outnumbering kind of species that our planet hosts. Similar to the failure the idea of the encyclopedia encountered. The problem of the collection is that is final goal would be to incorporate not only any specie, but also any difference that can be encountered within them, down to the singular differences between individuals. So the ultimate collection would coincide with every single individual of each specie, determining automatically the extinction of the whole fauna. The driving force of this is the unconscious desire of control, as what is possessed is controlled, believably understood and ultimately subject to our will. So every specimen is dried, placed in a drawer and named, as definitive proof of our dominion. The collector driving force, may it be applied to watches, specimens, art or action figures, is ultimately aimed in the creation of a world we the collector can feel to rule, as it is ordered by his own pleasure and logic, order that only him can modify and that otherwise remains static and unchanged in time.
One occasion to properly use the material from the “Quasi Vivi” collection was thanks to the CareOf/Fabbrica del Vapore art center in Milan. They selected some works to be temporary billboards outside their perimeter. So I could have one of the shots 4mx2m peeking in the streets of Milan. For the occasion I had chosen on purpose one of the most violent and shocking, adding just the “Quasi Vivi” “Almost Alive” slogan on the picture. I thought it as a regular advertisement, just more explicit and honest that the usual ones. It wasn't meant to sell something, but to put a doubt about the day by day city landscape in the mind of the people passing by.
Weapons of singular destruction. In this landscape of violence I began to think about the tools of violence. The objects men have developed to kill have reached incredible complexity but they at the end they all work in similar ways. A knife became an arrow, then a bullet and now a shrapnel. All shapes that are meant to pierce, conveying the available amount of energy in a single point so that it has the maximum penetration efficiency. Or other weapons distribute the force on different surfaces to obtain a smashing effect, or on a single surface, to slash. All this effects are due to the shape that a weapon have and I was fascinated by this relationship between shape and damage. Seemed to me a very refined essay on sculpture. So I have forged some weapons of different shape as an homage to one of the most developed field of research men have developed since the ancient times, not in honor of its purposes, but to its brutal sincerity.
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