Science suggests that everything beyond (our) control is tricky territory; I believe instead that we cannot emancipate from existing within the same “field” on Earth, respecting ethics of decay and transformation as an unresolvable framework of any social, ungendered ecology.
Layers of color mark my signature, my pace. I borrow materiality and chemistry through which we construct our environment and shape our interactions, then almost literally return these same materials to other organisms deemed ‘unproductive’, which autonomously regenerate their habitats after human disruption and manipulation. My position is straightforwardly that of a machine connecting subsystems.
This represents the core of the manifesto and the conference without anybody: to manifest one’s own agency by interbeing.
is the process of metamorphosis the ultimate cyborg?
The question arose in 2013 when I found myself under the same roof with a family of honeybees. They suddenly swarmed indoors and settled in, marking the first of many such visits from flying inhabitants. Over time, this experience gradually merged with the investigations into resource waste, corruption, and social injustice from my previous career. Non-human encounters unearthed the limits of wordsmithing and scientific observation, thereby I chose to devote my inquiry exclusively into the visual arts.
Further developments have since expanded my artistic practice into the process of metamorphosis, both as a working method and heuristic paradigm, through multiple lenses. After an initial interest in Nobel Prize winner von Frisch’s studies on the language of bees, and following contemporary sociobiologists, my field of research soon entangled anthropology and a queer perspective of going-gaga.
For a decade I have been co-labouring with moths and other pollinators to resume native habitats that have been functionally disrupted by human productivity standards: i foster the practice of failure as a response to the different biological contributions involving more-than-human species as well as the concept of “otherness” in our communities. the discarded organic materials i meticulously collect from industrial activities are living archives akin to archeological fragments that make sense of the present biological time.
To me, practicing art means foregrounding unresolvable positions and bringing forth an ethical acknowledgement of contemporary ecologies in the audience. The ‘otherwise’ summons the same experience of observing a nest in progress in a place expected to be domestic: it arises like an ephemeral, Goethean organism, self-determined, which we all, in turn, have responsibilities to. By nurturing intimate knowledge through materiality and facilitating the infinite process of life and death, my approach seeks to reclaim negotiable recovery after disruption or collapse. From which side, though?
The methods of the creative process are based on stratification and assembly, informed by the labor-intensive manipulation of one-of-a kind waste from apiculture, discarded due to moth infestation and subjected to further development by pollinators regardless and despite human ends. Each layer of intervention conveys an archival record of the entanglement across species and their coexistence over time. In these acts of synchronous care and prompts to duty I intend to continuously re-set positions, as well as subjects, for the public to accept or reject ambivalent boundaries, whether they are ecological, artificial, or hybridized by artistic imbrications.
Is this fraught process a failure or resilience? Or only to us?