Tidal, Porous, and Fragmentary

Roberto Cuoghi is the winner of the XXVII edition of the Pino Pascali Prize. According to tradition, a work by the artist would be exhibited at the Exchiesetta, the place where the history of the Prize began in 1969. Roberto Cuoghi has chosen to give up the space to five artists who will take turns throughout the exhibition, transforming it into a symbiotic and cohesive environment. Our bodies are not closed systems, but tidal, porous, and fragmentary. To think with water is to think in fragments, in dispersions, in unbounded flows. (Astrida Neimanis - Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, 2017) Arianna Ladogana’s installation “Tidal, Porous, and Fragmentary” is structured around four sculptural elements that evoke human bodies in a state of erosion and dissolution, immersed in tanks that collect the remains of a matter in perpetual liquefaction. These bodies, neither entirely human nor entirely machine, find themselves suspended in a cycle of self-destruction and metamorphosis, evoking a posthuman condition in which corporeal identity merges with the fluid and the technological. Through a hydrofeminist perspective, the work conceives the aquatic environment as a primordial matrix from which life has expanded onto dry land, but also as an inexhaustible network of connections that challenges the dichotomy between human and non-human. Here, water is not a simple background, but an active agent of transformation, an ecology in which bodies are never isolated, but rather part of a continuous exchange with other forms of existence. In this vision, water becomes a medium of relationship and contamination, an element that passes through bodies and makes them part of a shared biological, political and material history. Water is the medium that carries our fragments - not as broken pieces to be reassembled, but as interwoven traces of an ongoing, unfinished story. (Astrida Neimanis - Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, 2017) The work also enters into dialogue with the concept of symbiogenesis as a driving force of an evolution shaped by the cooperation between organisms, the fusion of cells and the continuous interaction between species. The dissolving bodies of the installation are therefore not isolated entities in a process of self-destruction, but transition points in a broader flow of transformation, in which the living cannot be thought of without the network of relationships that constitutes it. This relationship between interconnection and dissolution is deeply linked to the contemporary human condition, marked by a constant sense of crisis and instability. In the Anthropocene era, the boundary between life and death is becoming thinner: the human finds himself balanced between his drive towards technological innovation and the ecological collapse that he himself has generated. The installation suggests that there is no real separation between beginning and end, but rather a continuous cycle of transformation, where every dissolution is also a possibility of rebirth. Technology insinuates itself into bodies, In this fluidity, the presence of the machine becomes an ambiguous element: on the one hand, the incarnation of progress and innovation, on the other, the specter of its own obsolescence, a cyborg that is neither completely organic nor totally artificial, but hybrid and in progress. Technology contaminates and shapes them, revealing the vulnerability of the human and at the same time its potential for regeneration through new symbiosis with otherness. This complex relationship between human, nature and technology can be read through a vision that does not foresee separate categories (nature vs. culture, organic vs. artificial), but an inextricable network of relationships in which the actors – be they humans, machines or natural agents – co-determine each other. The installation thus becomes the visual representation of this Deception, in which bodies are no longer autonomous entities, but nodes in a network of material and symbolic interdependencies. “Tidal, porous, and fragmentary” is therefore located in a liminal territory, a hyper sea, an expanded ocean where the boundaries between subject and environment, between body and matter, dissolve in a process of continuous redefinition. There is no catastrophe, but transformation; there is no end, but incessant rewriting of what we call life. Here every end is always a new beginning, every dissolution a possibility of recomposition. A fragmented body is not a broken one but an emergent one - linked, interwoven, not seeking totality but acknowledging its dependencies. Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto, 1985, though reinterpreted hydrologically)