curated by Andrea Samory
Michele Bazzoli, Matteo Gatti, Ayako Hirogaki, Francesco Pacelli, Andrea Samory
Off-site collective exhibition held in December 2019
Nine Hours Hotel Otemachi, Tokyo, Japan
Installation view
Andrea Samory
Andrea Samory
Ayako Hirogaki
Ayako Hirogaki
Ayako Hirogaki
Michele Bazzoli
Michele Bazzoli
Michele Bazzoli
Andrea Samory
Michele Bazzoli
Photos by: Martin Holtkamp and Maaserhit Honda
TETSUO’S BODY
Text by Marcello Barison
Starting from
the late Seventies, several economic, social and political phenomena
contributed in creating a “dystopian” cultural trend, especially in the field
of cinema and comics, where the future world is represented not as the effect
of an idyllic development at a high technological level, but as a hell of
terror where the rise of scientific progress goes hand in hand with the nightmares
of a nihilistic and manipulative society. Many examples can be cited, from the
post-apocalyptic distortions of the Mad
Max saga (1979) to the disorienting civilization of Blade Runner (1982), moving through
the Xenomorph drawings (1979) by H.R. Giger. In the finale of the movie Akira (1988), the body of the
character Tetsuo turns into a huge shapeless and tentacular amoeba capable of
engulfing the entire universe, while in eXistenZ
(1999) by David Cronenberg, cyberpunk is morphologically integrated with
the organic and everything becomes a connection system both real and virtual. In
all these cases the determining factor is that the dystopian element, at once
disturbing and destructive, is made manifest by a deformation of the body.
It is hence
within this bio-horror reality that the collective exhibition Tetsuo’s body investigates how
corporality could be affected, remodeled and multiplied by the historical split
that an entire generation is now undergoing: on one hand, the environmental and
political catastrophism of the present, and on the other, the almost fideistic
promise of a future completely redeemed by technology. Stuck in the middle, the
flesh is deformed by these two morbidly rhetorical and unrealistic
perspectives.
The “Assemblage
Theory 2.0”* developed by Manuel De
Landa, namely the tendency to assemble apparently unrelated bodies- simulated
anatomical portions, inorganic elements, vegetal and animal structures, digital
devices, instruments, proliferating cellular enlargements, fabrics and tools of
various kinds, etc.- seems to define the polymorphic-dystopian body in perhaps
the most accurate way. De Landa’s proposal establishes a very clear distinction
between organism and assemblage. Both indicate entities produced by the
integrated union of heterogeneous parts, but unlike the organism, an assemblage
also includes the possibility of incorporating any kind of cosmic component,
therefore also inorganic. Everything, from the molecule to the ecosystem, can
be conceived as an assemblage.
Furthermore, the assemblage is the result of an
operation of interlocking, confusion and montage that unites whilst maintaining
the distinctions. The material synthesis of the assemblage, in fact, is an
extreme symbiosis between living and non-living elements, instilling in the
material, not without irony, a desire for a future that has sometimes the
character of nightmare.
Similarly, the assemblage emerges in the off-site
exhibition as a mad plastic ecosystem that produces unexpected and deformed
connections within the pristine and identical pods of a Capsule Hotel in Tokyo.
The stake, as in the Tetsuo’s Body project, is not to propose linear
hierarchies or filiations, but to contaminate objects and fears, inventing and
propagating, through a polymorphic and dystopic extension of the body, an
incurable epidemic of matter.
*Manuel De Landa,
A new Philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity (2006);
Assemblage theory (2016)