Federica Belli

Almanaque presents Accidentally Found Out by Italian photographer Federica Belli. The artist will give a talk on September 21 at 1pm.

In other times it would have been said: Human beings: here is the final catalog. But there is no true taxonomy of what we have become. To whom or to what does our future cling? Federica Belli poses precisely this question.

Once again, Heidegger comes to mind, but in reverse: there is no longer a God who can save us because God is ourselves... divinities, architects of a destiny more or less mixed with technologies or steroids of all kinds, which makes human life itself dysphoric.

Federica, in a journey that starts from books (by Paul Preciado, Mark Fisher, Gabriel Orozco and my own) transformed into a -force of the contemporary- turns around a well-known problem: today monsters are the only “normal” inhabitants in the path of human existence.

All this, even denied by those who stigmatize a Queer present, has aesthetic and ethical implications: where is the line between right and wrong? What can we save from being morally articulated?

They say that young people are trying to destroy the algorithms of social networks through shit-posting. Without ethics or coherent information, they feature only images that alternate meaningless meanings with a moral laxity that has yet to be measured. There is more truth in the Instagram feed of eighteen-year-olds than in the headlines of most newspapers.

In Belli's art project: Accidentally Found Out –which exists online and as an exhibition at ALMANAQUE-photographic gallery, curated by Arturo Delgado– we observe a mutation of what once could easily be defined binarily: human vs. animal, male vs. female, right vs. wrong, dangerous vs. harmless.... These staged photographs of certain individual and peculiar lives show the dysphoric conflicts we all face.

Homo Sapiens is reshaping its own lair: there will be hominids after the explosion, but they will not have the form of automatons. They will prefer to be animals among other animals, diverse and uncategorized: they, like clouds, will simply be in the world.

–Leonardo Caffo