Post Umano
Diffusissima Art Fair
Turin, Italy
Post-Umano. L'Ulteriorità was a group exhibition at Scalo Vallino, on Via Nizza in Turin, held within Diffusissima, the city-wide art event organised by the start-up Artàporter, which brings contemporary art into more than seventy venues around the city. Scalo Vallino is a late nineteenth-century building named after a former railway yard; long abandoned, it has been undergoing restoration, and Diffusissima reopened it to the public as one of its new spaces. The project was conceived and curated by Simone Sensi, with Artàporter's artistic directors Alyona Kosareva and Massimo Gioscia, as a "phygital" show of digital and physical artists: Federico Clapis, Lawrence Malstaf, Matteo Lucca, MiTch Laurenzana, Francesco Niccoli and Martina Fontana. It presented itself as an ideal sequel to Post Human, the exhibition curated by Jeffrey Deitch at the Castello di Rivoli, and imagined the post-human as a continuum between the animal, plant, mineral, extraterrestrial and technological worlds.
Clapis was the leading name of the show and the image on its poster, with a digital and dystopian vision in which technology is the medium of an inner journey. The photographs show his digital sculptures as large backlit screens set at the end of the building's bare corridors, framed by strips of light: a foetus seated on a plinth with a smartphone, and a stone-like female figure in a VR headset. In a raw, dimly lit room a projection showed a terracotta-coloured sculpture of a bird above a womb-like form.
The setting, a disused industrial building in transformation, gave his virtual statues the character of finds in a ruin, in line with the exhibition's question about what humans might become.