Geographies of Loss — Marta Maglio

On Thursday, June 11th, from 6 to 9 pm, Recontemporary is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Marta Maglio, winner of the third edition of the REC Prize 🎈

What happens to the world when humanity disappears? What happens when all the hierarchies and pre-established rules of gender and species are subverted?

Founding her own artistic research on the theories of post-humanism and transfeminism, Marta Maglio opens the gaze toward new worlds, to immagine forms of cohabitation and co-becoming between human and non-human. Freed from the structures imposed by society, the traces of the past still safeguard the geological memory of the Earth, but interweave and transform themselves through technology. The Geographies of Loss are the virtual maps constructed starting from what remains of a previous life: 3D scans and videos generated by artificial intelligence stratify themselves with archival images, microorganisms, fossils and archaeologies. In these geographies, loss and removal are made present to reflect on the past and fling open possible futures. Selecting the artist together with an international jury, the third edition of the Premio Recontemporary thus orients its own research toward a reflection on the condition of the body in the post-digital era and on the absurdity of human greed, tied to the desire for conquest, exploitation and overreach.

In this perspective, the space of Recontemporary transforms itself into a post-human underwater environment that leads to Cattedrale Abisso: a place in which microfossils and microorganisms are the last custodians of the geological memory of the Earth, celebrated with the rituality of a sacred space. A cathedral inhabited solely by two organic species, the Radiolaria and the Foraminifera, veritable temporal compasses and the sole reference points for orienting oneself in a time that no longer belongs to us. There no longer exists any race for resources, for rare earths, for all that has made the planet an object of exploitation. Interacting directly with the video and entering to become part of this new surface, the visitor is invited to assume a different condition and position of listening, in which he no longer occupies the center of the scene but becomes, perhaps for the first time, part of an ecosystem.

The dialogue with the past opens through the confrontation with an animal archive, evoked in the work Phantom Derma, realised by the artist during the residency “Nucleo” at the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali of Turin. The work interweaves media archaeology and animal histories, raising questions on the weight of three centuries of colonial collecting, in which animals were transformed into trophies, exhibited publicly as a symbol of status and conquest. Reconstructing the travel routes of the animals that arrived at the Palazzina di Caccia of Stupinigi and at the Reale Giardino Zoologico of Turin, Maglio seeks to retrace their forced itineraries, creating a narrative that is at once human and non-human, which combines period footage and maps, transforming the taxidermised animal into the symbol of a contradiction of the contemporary era. To overturn the systems that have organised the world — social, cultural, economic — appears then as a possible form of resistance in a time in which the space of dominion of the human being becomes ever more labile, the capacity for control dissolves and the very idea of a dominant species is going extinct. In this scenario, the works of Maglio imagine other forms of coexistence and belonging. Not a conquest, but a call to listening and to the possibility of constructing new relations.

How might life be reborn on Earth if we were to stop observing the world as something to be possessed and were to begin to recognise ourselves as part of its own ecosystem?

Exhibited artworks:

 

Phantom Derma

Realised for the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali of Turin during the residency “Nucleo”, Phantom Derma interweaves media archaeology and animal histories to interrogate three centuries of colonial collecting, tracing and reconstructing the histories of the animal-objects that passed through the Palazzina di Caccia of Stupinigi and the Reale Giardino Zoologico of Turin.
3D scans generated with AI become reflective surfaces, absent presences, elusive, never completely observable. These digital ghosts stratify themselves with fragments of photography and silent cinema, footage of period naturalistic and explorative documentaries, and videos generated by AI through the manipulation of historical images, creating a visual fabric where memory and fiction dialogue. Through this medial weaving emerge the histories of the animal-objects: projections of desire and conquest, hunting trophies and scientific specimens, expression of a colonial imaginary, of a taste for the “exotic”, and of a concept of the “natural” that sustain the disturbing foundations of modern nation-states.
The musealised bodies become the point of departure for re-tracing the itineraries forcedly travelled, to reconstruct, through period footage, both the geographies of belonging of the animals themselves and, going backwards, the stages and the mutable places traversed by them. In this narrative, human and non-human together, there manifests itself the unresolved ambiguity of the taxidermised animal: balanced between life and death, nature and culture, object and ghost, loss and survival in the time of mass extinctions.

Cattedrale Abisso

In the darkness of the oceanic abysses, where microfossils and microorganisms safeguard the geological memory of the Earth, a living cathedral takes form. Body, matter and technology dissolve into one another, generating a sensory ecosystem in continuous transformation.
An amber fossil becomes an interface: a controller realised with organic materials and integrated sensoristics allows one to navigate and manipulate the digital creatures, 3D scans of Radiolaria and Foraminifera. The sensor lifted, the microorganisms respond to the slowness or the speed of whoever or whatever interacts with them, in a reflection on the deep time of the medium-Earth and of anthropic time. Microscopic structures enlarge themselves into walkable architectures, while the sound compositions of Odia (Gerarda Avallone) weave dialogues between organic and digital, interweaving sound and movement. The installation immerses us in a non-human time, that of terraformation: relational and symbiotic, broken by anthropic linearity.
The video work in loop unfolds the histories of two species of microorganisms, the Radiolaria and the Foraminifera. The latter configure themselves as temporal compasses for the stratigraphic dating of the earth and for future speculation tied to climate changes. The alien landscape of the abyssal depths emerges as an entity documentable solely by a machinic, non-human gaze, controlled and guided by humans.
The dilated temporality of the transformations of the non-human is disturbed by the present race for rare earths contained in the seabeds and by the current pressures toward ‘Deep Mining’. Global protests, of a strongly performative character, place themselves alongside the non-human histories, weaving interspecies alliances. Suspended between real and virtual, Cattedrale Abisso is an invitation to listening: a hybrid body open to decomposition and collective co-creation, where human, non-human and machine breathe together.

Composition and Sound Design by Odia (Gerarda Avallone).