Compost n.1 is the first episode of an artistic project that combines science, video art, and digital sculpture and is inspired by Donna Haraway’s latest studies. In particular, the first video of the series is linked to his concept of survival in an infected era – an increasingly urgent topic in times of epidemics – and to the need to move away from an anthropocentric perspective to create new symbiotic relationships between different species. The video shows a future panorama marked by the ecological crisis and populated by symbiotic assemblages – bio-fabricated artificial intelligence – that wallow in limbo halfway between natural and artificial, in which humanity is reduced to a crystalline form.
The Citron | Lunardi Project was born from the meeting of two different personalities: Selene Citron (1986) is a teacher of sculptural plastic disciplines at the Amedeo Modigliani Art School in Padua. She is a sculptor and performer, while Luca Lunardi (1980) has a background in humanities, is a videomaker and deals with audiovisual scientific production.
From the beginning of our collaboration, the stylistic code has been characterized by an exercise of imagination and exchange or instead from contamination of materiality and immateriality in which everyone allows themselves to be contaminated by the search for the other. From the first works in which the theme of identity emerged in different facets (from gender identity to national identity), the project has taken a step forward by absorbing recent paths of posthumanist thought.
This development has led us to question the very nature of the human condition, which is increasingly blurred and shaped by new technologies. Precisely because of the border between nature and artifice, we conceive art as a relationship and flow of contamination that leads us to create in pairs (the Citron | Lunardi project) or alone works or rather “organisms” that mix video with sculpture in 3D printing, performance with photogrammetry. Technical and conceptual contamination leads us to imagine worlds already beyond the catastrophe in which the position of man is finally decentralized and liberated from the obsession of being the measure of all things but creates new symbiotic relationships between different species, and it becomes a hybridized part of a continuously evolving whole increasingly outside of an anthropocentric perspective.
The latest work, which will be part of a series still in progress (“Compost”), was born from the in-depth analysis of the most recent studies by Donna Haraway, and in particular, it is linked to the concept of interspecies symbiosis. Our works have participated in national and international exhibitions.
