Curated by
IUNO

The wild is a shifting category. It is what remains, what lingers in the margins, the original root. It is chaos, which in archaic cosmogony comes even before time. It is what is saved and what saves us: it is resistant, untamed nature, capable of embracing the irrational.

Prehistoric and Indigenous societies have revered the wild and the feminine as integral parts of the natural world, recognizing their deep bond with the earth, animals, and cosmic rhythms—an embodiment of powerful, Indomitable sacredness. The Great Mothers represented the power to give and take life, balancing creation and destruction, nourishment and protection, instinct and wisdom.
The dominant patriarchal culture severed the bond between the wild and the feminine, reinterpreting over time aspects of birth, care, reproduction, and ancestral knowledge as monstrous. In medieval bestiaries, sirens and harpies represent the threat of seduction and chaos, reflecting the fear of an uncontrollable femininity. The Sphinx, enigmatic guardian of knowledge and death, embodies an ambivalent femininity—both alluring and threatening, associated with wisdom and destruction alike. Witches, once healers and gatherers of medicinal herbs, became creatures to be hunted, just like wild animals or spontaneous plants. For centuries, the monstrous represented an alterity that was at the same time untamable, therefore repulsive and dangerous.
Yet, beyond embodying fear and desire, inhabiting difference has also led to practicing forms of rebellion and resistance—what we might call a ‘re-enchantment of the world’: a reinstituted relationship with the living that has the power to destabilize and reshape social and cultural structures.

Selvatica seeks to reclaim, through the gaze of contemporary women artists, how the alliance with the wild, the indomitable, the animal today gives the monstrous back its complex face.

Works by: Chiara Camoni, Cleo Fariselli, Gaia Fugazza, Helena Hladilová, Lucia Leuci, Grossi Maglioni, Cynthia Montier, Caterina Morigi, Marta Roberti, Francis Upritchard, Alice Visentin.