HYPER DUST. A SERIES OF POSTHUMAN RELATIONS
Solo Exhibition, depositomele, Milano, 2022
Curated by Maria Grazia Piccirillo, Daniel Dolci
It rests on objects, floats in the air, covers vast expanses of arid soil, transforms, grows and moves, its presence is constant and often invisible to our eyes, except in a form that is not pleasant to look at and that is usually associated with dirt, decay and loneliness.
Dust is the protagonist of this story, the place of finds, the space of action, the container of experiences, the beyond. An addition beyond the usual meaning, dust not swept away but collected in many other bodies and moments, approached for the first time, observed, explored, rehabilitated, perhaps accepted, in a dialogue between life and death. Dust embraces these two worlds, worlds that man has divided because he fears the terrible spectacle of the end, of disappearing, but above all of transforming matter and the body, of decomposing it into something unacceptable to society, especially before the spectacularisation of “eternal” life. In the dust we find the scraps of everyday life and at the same time living matter, evolving towards the “end”. Here we are deceived by matter itself and by the different forms it takes, and we are forced to look at it, at the spectacle of “death in progress”, without denying or embellishing it. It is not easy to observe this dynamic, just as it is not easy to live with dust, in its most common sense and in its most common form. But what if the latter becomes a portrait of something that no longer causes so much horror? What if it connected us to stories past and present? What if it were to present us with a reality that is no longer immaterial or symbolic?
We would probably have a new lens to look at the relationships that exist between what we have created and what inevitably exists and cannot be controlled; we would be led to openly explore what we try in vain every day to make “ours”, to explain, to label and to define logically, otherwise impossible to accept. The act of dusting, of removing the “ugly” to make room for order, cleanliness and beauty, is in fact the daily transposition of an act that human constantly performs in society, establishing paradigms and conventions that regulate life and give it specific meanings. But it is only a linguistic moment regulated by time, an action that, from the moment it is born, is destined to change precisely because of the flow of time, which affects definitions and, consequently, identities, moment by moment, constantly modifying its parts with new concepts.
Alice and Ahad’s operation attempts to encompass all these fragments, different in time and space, through a language that refers to matter rather than the symbolism of the word; an expression of the real and the human, understood as “clusters of cells” rather than definitions and information. A complex set of data that is not immortal and that, paradoxically, contains “everything” – the flow of time, habits, change, life, death, dialogue, silence, separation and union in an active coexistence. This is the path we are invited to discover, in a moment of contradiction and complementarity, which represents the cmplexity of human existence.
Text by Maria Grazia Piccirillo
