ABOUT THE SERIES

Roberto Kusterle’s series Marks of Metembiosis shows photographs in which the skin of the people photographed has been torn away to a greater or lesser extent in order to reveal an underlying mesh of bristly and prickly sticks, spikes and twigs, whose chaotic jumble displays the hypothetical inner anatomy of stuffed men and women: our authentic human nature. Weird creatures protrude from these flayed bodies as if they have sprouted from the internal chaos, or else crouch as warnings of the potential reversal of roles between men and beasts, men and nature. Now it is human beings who are inhabited by animals or provide animals with vantage points or supports as in Quartet, Growth, Curiosity, Meditations, Hunting Gift, Distrustful Owl, Song Branch, Peaceful Cohabitation, and, in particular, Vantage Point. And there is no differentiation between men and women: the feminine attributes, although evident and sometimes arousing, almost disappear before a common destiny of oppression that in the past was exerted and now is endured. There is no longer any distinction between prey and predator since both are bound together in a symbiosis or, better, in an authentic metembiosis, a transmigration-transformation of the two bodies, man and boar, rendered in an initial or advanced, but still incomplete, stage. As in other works by Kusterle, this metembiosis hints at a possible drift towards the post-human, though not a post-human reinforced by robotic prostheses, grafts or genetic manipulation, but weakened (or strengthened) by animal or avian implants in a regression towards a primordial and unconscious nature that humanity thought had been tamed but that instead returns, powerful and inexorable, to encroach on territories from which it had been evicted.

From the exhibition text by Giuseppe O. Longo