FLEAS IN MY SCALES by Giovanni Vetere
A Collaborative Project between Union Gallery & The Orange Garden
Fleas In My Scales tells the story of future histories. It offers an imaginative extension of our present condition in the form of a fantastic world, in which science, society and a heightened awareness of environmentalism intersect.
Giovanni Vetere draws inspiration from the information, ideas, and techniques of science in order to create and assemble complex narratives, iconographies, installations and environments. His practice intersects with this field by consolidating various methods of observation and expression such as the privileging of sensory experience, attention to pattern or archetype, the employment of symbolic language or form, and the consideration of nature.
By taking a scientific fact and building an imaginary around it, Giovanni’s work acts as a critical function to society and plays with notions of potentiality and actualisation. By concerning himself with the contingencies involved in producing the future, the artist interrogates the constraints and limitations of our capacity to imagine a more harmonious future in which humanity is finely attuned to the environment.
Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we get there?
If we understand the human body as a molar subject in the Deleuzean sense, in that we are forged by social, political, cultural, biological, physical and historical flows, then we can infer that we can better understand the world based upon our perception and awareness of these flows.
By adopting a post-humanist stance towards the Deleuzian body, the artist aims to de-centre the way we perceive our own bodies by insisting upon the idea that we are chiasmically entwined with the world and that all human beings are permeable and permeate one another. We are thus fundamentally trans-corporeal and are constantly pulled into a symbiotic relationship with other bodies.
The focus of the exhibition is on how new paradigms (of art and science) are finding new ways to break down life and build it up again, and what this might mean for how we understand kinship and ourselves. In Fleas In My Scales, the artist aims at de-sedimenting our human-scaled perspective of the world in order to investigate our lived experience beyond this point.
