Materia Esotica

Materia Esotica (Exotic Matter) is the title of the project on show in the spaces of Contemporary Cluster, Palazzo Brancaccio (Rome). The combination of these two words, loaded with meanings, identifies the latest research nucleus of the artist who has made the hybridisation of the animal and vegetable world his main area of study. But the artist goes further by revealing, through a skilful aesthetic machine, the modifications imposed by humans on the organisms that make up the planet: plants, animals, soil, air, fruits, are just some of the elements “uprooted” from their own cycle and inserted, grafted into a hyper-productive and performing machine at the service of the anthropocene.

So it is that the effects of the changes imposed over the years spill over like a wave onto the precarious condition of human life. We are faced with a nature that is other, altered, fascinating and toxic at the same time, where organisms reconstitute themselves and rebel against human hegemony, regrouping in ancestral but contextually unusual forms. The Siphonophiri, at the centre of Petti’s most recent research, provide an aesthetic and functional canon on the forms proposed: different elements that seal a pact of life, cohabiting and coexisting in their diversity to form a single, interdependent being.