Chimera
Solo exhibition at Gallery Ether - Tokyo, Japan, 2025
“Where your fear is, there is your task” - Carl Jung.
Nowadays’ fears and anxieties towards the massive technological and cultural changes that our society is going through are often processed and visualized via images and tropes that are thousands -sometimes tens of thousands- years old. The sharing of contemporary lore is a testimony of the human need for religion and mythology, to process the mystery of our fragile human bodies against something much larger than us to admire and to fear. This also highlights how many contemporary fears repeat themselves through history and how they mirror psychological biases that humans evolved as basic social tools for survival.
The exhibition “Chimera” delves into the creation of an absurd new nature, which is a reflection on nowaday’s fears and hopes for a Post-Human and Trans-Human future. The imaginary borrows from speculations into undiscovered animal species and cryptids, as well as mythology and religion. This archetypical bestiary is paralleled with contemporary utopic and dystopic projections: DNA manipulation and bioengineering, environmental disasters, and historical cathastrophes involving toxic chemicals/radiations.
Limbs and parts are combined into realistic looking organisms which, upon closer inspection, could never exist in real life. The shapes are as abstract as they are realistic, as ridiculous as they are terrifying. They highlight our endless -and morbose- fascination with powerful, larger-than-life creations, along with the fears and expectations that we have for the future.
