Opere, interventi, contributi di:

Irene Pucci, Donato Trovato, Claudia Giannuli, Mariantonietta Bagliato, Arianna Ladogana, Natasha Grassi, Martina Petrelli, Ginevra Bosa, Raffaele Fiorella, Angelo Iodice, Antonio Milano, Mariangela Giustini, Silvana Di Blasi, Pier Alfeo, Zeinab Haji, Michela Rondinone.

Curated by:

Like A Little Disaster

The idea of the end of the world has always been a subject of reflection for the human species, which has transposed it into cinema, literature, and art in an attempt to master, synthesize, and understand it. Because the apocalypse should lead to a revelation – from the Greek kalýptein, meaning to remove the veil, to unveil; or perhaps, more simply, dealing with the apocalypse would serve to exorcise a shared fear, as talking about it, in a superstitious way, distances the possibility of it happening. Perhaps, by witnessing its destruction, we might finally be able to see what the world is truly like.

“Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

“Play Dead!” seeks to explore the concept of the end (and its opposite, the beginning, the new beginning. The alpha and the omega). Within an interconnected and agentic mesh, the project juxtaposes different perspectives, creating cells where it is possible to experience the mutual connections between the biotic and the abiotic, between cybernetic life and physical death, between the tangibility of physical limits and the illusion of a perpetual scroll. These satellites would want to provide a means to reflect on the threat of global disaster, collective suicide, and the desire for resurrection, or on the unsettling shadow cast by the future.

Through religious and animistic visions, as well as conceptual, posthumanist, transhumanist, and ecological theories and practices, the project attempts to experiment with transcending the limit, posing questions such as: What do we find beyond the end? And beyond death? Does death necessarily represent the end, or can we consider the possibility of being simultaneously alive and dead, or neither alive nor dead, outside the gaze of the other? Has the end of the world already occurred, is it occurring, or will it occur? If, as Heidegger asserts, by “world” we mean “a totality of meaning,” then it has never truly existed. There are only portions of the world, those with which we engage from time to time. Is it therefore a matter of coming to terms with this end—which is always, at the same time, (another/first) beginning? Does being able to already see the world in the light of the final catastrophe mean seeing it as it will one day appear or recognizing its morphological contemporaneity with us?

“Play Dead!” is a long-term project spanning a calendar year, during which there will be a random process of evaporation of the artworks; they disappear to make space for virulent and expansive reincarnations triggered by other artists. The exhibition, which began in July 2024 with a specific configuration and display, periodically transforms, ending up entirely different from how it started. This abandonment produces a metamorphosis, a new life—or rather, new forms of life—sparked by successive deaths.

Unlike the works involved in the first phase/body of the project’s metamorphosis, which were strongly characterized by a thoroughly human use of language—conceptual, visual, poetic, political, performative, and mythical—the works in the second evolutionary phase are set within a natural scenario. This heightened environment serves as a catalyst for speculations on the concepts of end/beginning—death/rebirth—through a multifaceted lens of the non-human, understood as animal, vegetal, mineral, technological, and hyper-artificial.

*The title “Pay Dead!” refers to apparent death; a behaviour through which animals as well as some fungi or plants “pretend” to be dead. It is a state of immobility triggered by a traumatic, predatory, defensive or reproductive act and can be observed in a wide range of animals, from insects and crustaceans to mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish and, of course, in humans.

*The exhibition is mentally/spiritually supported by @wecroakapp

WeCroak is an app that each day sends you five invitations at randomized times to stop and think about death.

It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to be a happy person one must contemplate death five times daily.

I play dead
It stops the hurting
I play dead
And the hurting stops
It’s sometimes just like sleeping
Curling up inside my private tortures
I nestle into pain
Hug suffering
Caress every ache
I play dead,
It stops the hurting. ²