bianca salvo

2012

photography, organic material, archival anatomical plates

“The search for the primitive is, then, as old as civilization. It is the search for the utopia of the past, projected into the future, with civilization being the middle term.”

Stanley Diamond, 1974, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization

Exploiting the correspondences between science and art, the project explores the dynamic interaction between creation, preservation and destruction, and the struggling between primitivism and civilization. The project is composed by seven pieces in total, showing different sizes, and embracing a series of combined practices, from collage to physical procedures and interventions on the photographic surface, with the purpose of participating actively into the artistic process and, physically doing irruption into the evidence based reality. In order to expose and disintegrate the empirical order and the linearity on which the pillars of civilization sit, archival medical illustrations have been combined with organic materials in acrylic light boxes, where the matter has been fed for days in an agar solution in order to grow. This procedure gave birth to contaminated plates of human species, which have been then photographed as traces of the primal and raw condition of humanity, finally brought to light again. Medical illustrated resources have been used, also, for the creation of the series of collages, depicting tiny electrical devices treated as they were organic and combined with labels originally referred to specific parts of human body, which have been re-ordered and re-assembled with no logical sense. Finally the stone, stays for the ‘monolith’ of human nature. Imperfect and primitive, it contains an intrinsic dichotomy of meanings and his visceral and primordial spirit indicates to the viewer the beginning and the end, and the middle term of human existence. Suggesting implications for the past, the present and the future of a mankind involved in the accomplishment of eternal endurance, the series eludes to the petrified, preserved, and permanent impression of the fossils as a challenge for human temporal registers.