hello, medina here.

my position finds home in expressions of fragility and metamorphosis. first-hand experiences have led my practice to explore how camouflage acts as a survival pattern within disturbed habitats asserting their own agency, beyond human design and artistic purposes.  sculpture remains the primary universe i orbit, throughout forms of embodiment and care which involve an intensive co-labouring with native organisms across a multifaceted language.  i trust colours as moral bodies: chromatic layering marks my signature and represents an attempt to bring to the fore gestures of adaptation, invisible boundaries and the ambivalence of belonging.  for me the creative process addresses diverse subjectives to build up a common terrain to inhabit.

still learning. 

the ground zero happened in 2013: i found myself living under the same roof as a family of honeybees.  they swarmed indoors and settled for months, making my space theirs. i still cannot say whether it was a negotiation or an entanglement across realms – not so separate, as i realised.  however, the encounter marked my career shift from investigative journalism into visual arts.  subsequent, spontaneous cohabitations over seasons led me to study their languages across sociobiology, art, architecture and ethnographic methodologies.  my gaze, my practice, continue to explore that sense of awe and displacement (of being a participant, yet not a part) within a community mutually othered (urphänomen, 2016–18; tamed h/abit series, 2019–ongoing).

then came the moths. i owe much to their controversial labour, often labelled pestilent yet now recognised as vital for reducing forms of pollution.  interestingly, both of us depend on same environmental cues to stay healthy.  we met by error a decade ago, when i was an art student showcasing in a museum for the first time, perhaps with more excitement than awareness. after one month, the museum temporarily closed due to moth infestation: my first major exhibition (in buono stato, opera prima, 2016) became a sublime, unplanned collaboration, spreading life and decay across the pinacotheque’s walls, being the visitors the unique witnesses.

a mechanism of doing and undoing has since become my methodology: a way of listening to, processing, and conveying certain choreographies of control embedded in our relationality (esercizio di decenza, 2022; in secret dens, 2024).

the creative process demands intensive labour distributed across different stages carried out over seasons, that ultimately opens a space for multiple agencies to inhabit. it involves weaving relationships and archives of memories. I first collect resources from apiculture waste, and carry on bespoke procedure to take care and hybridise materials by their organic features. techniques span across mosaic, fresco, carving, sculpting, feral practices, renaissance oil painting.  co-labouring with moths means allowing their feeding, nesting, disruptions and life cycles to physically alter surfaces and structural integrity of materials making their metabolic activity inseparable from the work’s formation.

i do not determine the duration of the creative process or extent of their interventions. the process remains open until someone takes care of it, whether they are pollinators or human beings.  patterned environments – continuously reshaped by every organism that comes after, evolving in turn – embody, in my vision, the bare sense of existence.

chromaticity has multiple meanings to me, it sets a physical space where things happen underneath, as processes are stretched to their edges. their becoming-else brings a self-generative dimension in my vision, until species boundaries dissolve (the conference without any/body, 2024–ongoing).