“Eyes wide oper”
Maria Adele Del Vecchio, Eleonora Meoni, Marta Orlando
“Save your tears (and sighs) for another day”
Janina Frye, Arianna Ladogana
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! evolved within the spaces of Kora Contemporary Art Center over the course of a year-long program. As the seasons unfolded, we witnessed a random process of evaporation—works vanishing only to make way for virulent, expansive reincarnations by other artists. The exhibition began with a precise form and visual composition, only to find itself radically altered by its conclusion. Abandonment did not mark an end but activated a portal of transformation, a gateway to new life forms triggered by the decomposition of what came before.
Conceived as an open system, Play Dead! follows the principle of the butterfly’s multi-bodied metamorphosis: not a linear transition, but a rhizomatic process in which each stage—egg, larva, chrysalis, imago—carries within it the memory of what has been and the implicit potential of what is yet to come. Here, transformation is not a teleological drive toward resolution, but an incessant becoming, where each trace is already the anticipation of its disappearance, and each ending preludes a new expansion. The entire project thus configures itself as a shifting field of forces, a dispositif in which matter consumes itself to generate other possibilities—a cycle that, like Heraclitean time, never returns identical to itself but renews in every instant of its own flux.
The works involved in the first state/body of the metamorphosis of Play Dead! engaged with the dynamics of beginning and end through the (conceptual, visual, poetic, political, performative, mythical) dimension of the word—the verb, the principle (of the end). This phase operated as an inquiry into language, not merely as an expressive tool but as a generative and terminal act; a reflection on language as a site of difference and slippage, where meaning is never fixed but always shifting, always escaping itself.
In the second evolutionary phase, we witnessed an interplay between the works and the generative cyclicality of life and death, viewed through a non-human, trans-subjective gaze. Here, an echo emerged—an expanded vision of identity as dissolution, where perspective deconstructs itself, making space for an existence that transcends the human.
Play Dead! III embodies the ultimate performative stage of the chrysalis—the threshold where transformation becomes both act and possibility. Here, metamorphosis is not merely biological or symbolic but unfolds as a radical experience of limit: a double movement between affirmation and dissolution, where beginning and end do not stand in opposition but sustain and amplify one another. Both responses/project proposals oscillate between persistence, resistance, and survival—not as mere strategies of permanence but as matrices of new potentialities, as movements that regenerate themselves through confrontation with the limit, in the capacity to inhabit the threshold between what ceases to be and what is yet to become.
– Resistance to life through the salvific power of writing, which becomes body and remedy, memory and antidote against oblivion, in “Ad occhi aperti” (Maria Adele Del Vecchio, Eleonora Meoni, Marta Orlando). Here, the word is both refuge and rebellion, a space of survival and a device of resignification.
– The survival of a body (human/non-human) through the pervasive, almost intrusive presence of the machine, of technology—perpetually oscillating between the embodiment of progress and innovation and an aura of self-referential decay, which paradoxically becomes seductive in its latent obsolescence and death—in “Save your tears (and sighs) for another day” (Janina Frye, Arianna Ladogana).
*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.
