Luisa Mè
Giovanni Vetere
curated by
Marcelle Joseph
Lychee One proudly presents Tides in the Body, an exhibition featuring new work by the artist duo Luisa Mè and Giovanni Vetere and curated by Marcelle Joseph, the gallery’s 2020 curatorial consultant. In our Anthropocene geological age that is named after the human species that has transformed our fragile planet through global capitalism to one that is characterised by wild weather, drought, floods, fires, warming oceans, melting icebergs and accelerating extinctions of other biological species, this exhibition instead looks at homo sapiens as ‘bodies of water’[1] that are generative and gestational in their watery embodiment that leaks and seethes in direct opposition to Enlightenment Man’s notion of what Donna Haraway calls ‘human exceptionalism and bounded individualism’. To stop, in the poet Eugenio Montale’s words, ‘the oblivion of the world’, these human bodies, that are made up of more than two-thirds water, take responsibility and live ecologically. In our age of ‘liquid modernity’ – a term coined by Zygmunt Bauman at the turn of the millenium - where ‘change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty’, this exhibition proposes a solution to the sustainability of the planet and its inhabitants that does not depend on short-term economic growth or profit-seeking motives but instead calls for people working in concert to find instinctual answers over the flow of time to life’s challenges.
Together, the works in this exhibition stir the tides in our own bodies and awaken our community-minded spirit to take action to save our planet. As Haraway cautions, we may be in need of a ‘third story’, not the Anthropocene, not the Capitalocene but the Chthulucene where homo sapiens imagine themselves to be invertebrate octopi, ‘the mobile, many-armed predators of the sea, pulsating through and over the coral reefs…in nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle’.[3]
[1] A. Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
[2] C. Āsberg and A. Neimanis, ‘Bodies of the Now: Feminist Values in Posthuman Times’ (talk), Visions of the Now Arts and Technology Festival, Stockholm, Sweden (May 2013), quoting D. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
[3] D. Haraway, ‘Chapter 2: Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’ in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
