Matteo Gatti - Carolina Rossi Casanovas at My Home / Turin

Matteo Gatti - Carolina Rossi Casanovas

March/June 2020

My Home - Turin

"[…] And it is not only by external enemies that I am threatened. There are also enemies in the bowels of the earth. I have never seen them, but legend tells of them and I firmly believe in them. They are creatures of the inner earth; not even legend can describe them. Their very victims can scarcely have seen them; they come, you hear the scratching of their claws just under you in the ground, which is their element, and already you are lost. Here it is of no avail to console yourself with the thought that you are in your own house; far rather are you in theirs." 

The burrow, Franz Kafka


Home has become our shelter, it protects us and it keeps us safe. From our screens, the world appears now like unknown, precarious, with uncertain shapes and indefinite shades. Who will guarantee us that our bedding will not lead us to a weird state of mutation, whose risks could maybe be even higher than those out there, beyond us? 
Could it be that the obsessive repetition of our actions will lead us to a total psychic decentralization, to a transformation of our bodies and identities, towards an unwanted animality?
This forced lockdown, the elimination of any kind of social relations makes us constantly lurk, looking more and more like beasts in their nests, almost reaching the human being dissolution. Underground there is darkness, humidity, the smell of the our preys that lie in the freezer, lifeless. Nothing reassuring, and yet we keep standing still, in silence.

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Domestic animals is a project realized during the lockdown period, made with materials found at home: paper, pencils, some led lights - findings from an ancient world in which parties were still allowed - and an old compact camera. The project includes different media as drawing, photography, installation and writing.
Five drawings were installed in the most used spaces/areas of the flat in which we spent the quarantine, in Torino, Italy. Indistinct creatures, both with animal, vegetable and human features, inhabit the hallucinatory environment, the main character of the project. The project is first of all a reaction to the boredom and to the forced inactivity.