Ambra Castagnetti the Zone

At a time when machines seem annoyingly alive and we frighteningly lifeless, #ambracastagnetti blurs the boundaries that separate us from them, unleashing the fervor of complexity on the apocalypse of binary logic.

Her sculptures present themselves as figures that deliberately – even rather shamelessly – upset the specular logic of opposites (natural/artificial, human/animal, male/female, good/evil) on which man’s intellectual arrogance is based, we who no longer believe in anything that cannot be scientifically proven, and are indeed terrified of our own desire.

These shapeshifting presences are neither perfect nor immortal, they do not live in a peaceful utopia nor do they aspire to do so. Their metallic armor reveals their essence, weak yet enduring. They are an appeal to fragility as a principle of existence. Weakness is strength, and strength is nothing.
For generations, the transformed, grotesque and indecipherable body has been celebrated in subversive subcultures as a response to the social conformity of the healthy, beautiful and clean body that fits perfectly into predefined social models. It is against this standardization of bodies, and against the respectability and dignity of those who are always on the right side and never on the wrong side, that the myth of the Cyborg arises in all of its monstrous splendor. Composed of "cyb", short for cyber - from the Greek kybernàn, which means to steer - and "org", short for organism, the Cyborg is an innovative interpretation not only of the body, and not only of machines, but of what happens between them.

By consciously embodying the violence and injustice inflicted on their hybrid bodies, these chimeric organisms are able to generate a sort of liberating awareness. And by means of a "non-innocent" language, they invite us to abandon human exceptionalism in favor of a lateral, decentralized and sprawling way of thinking. They thus open themselves up to the risk of heterogeneous connections and contaminations. It is another approach, according to which magic and science, the symbolic and the concrete, the technocratic and the politically engaged, not only can but must work together.

In the Zone, ancestral knowledge and technological progress merge together, and thus temporality is not linear: the future does not inexorably move away from the past, but, as in a spiral, it protects, surrounds, recombines and reinterprets it. The Zone is a border area, and borders are always pleasantly busy, but a risky place to live in. They are thresholds for the proliferation of differences. Here no one lives everywhere; everyone lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything. Everything is connected to something.

Further information in the press release to download