“Human”

Performance Art， Photography， 2019
This performance uses a physiological condition of the artist - dermographic urticaria - as a means of expression to activate a creative process in which the body becomes an instrument and support of the work. On the surface of her own back, symbolically understood as a metaphor for the Earth, the artist repeatedly engraves the Chinese character “人” (man) with a sharp object until it fills the space entirely.

The gesture, simple but loaded with meaning, represents the appearance and spread of humanity on the planet. The skin reactions - swelling, redness, itching - generate a visual and sensitive map of the effects of human existence, evoking the traces, wounds and transformations left by human action on the environment. However, like these skin manifestations, human imprints are transient and reversible: after about an hour, everything vanishes, leaving the body intact.

The work reflects on notions of time, impermanence and memory, interrogating the durability of the human imprint in the context of nature. Through a poetics of body and sign, the artist raises essential questions about the anthropocentric condition,sull’identità e sull’invisibilità finale dell’essere umano nel ciclo cosmico.