Working with performance and sculpture, Giovanni Vetere’s artistic practice is rooted in the idea of embodiment and on expanding the notion of “body” and our sense of “human” on this planet.
The artist’s Platform exhibition presents six new ceramic sculptures and four limited-edition photographs, produced in their studio in Rome.
Drawing on ideas from both trans- and post-humanism, Vetere rejects the basic concept that “man is the measure of all things”, emphasising a new beyond-human narrative and promoting the techno-futurist vision of the transgression of human biology. These approaches help the artist to reassess our relationship with the environment and enable them to reconsider the agency of human and nonhuman nature.
Watch
Giovanni Vetere - Platform from Unit London on Vimeo.
Seeking new forms of embodiment in nature, Vetere invites us to listen to our own potentialities of becoming the other, of becoming something else.
The artist aims at bringing awareness to the idea that our bodies and the environment are inextricably linked. The sea remains a largely unknown realm where the limits of self-understanding and human concern are tested, acting as a (hydro)common space in which the imaginative encounter with the nonhuman is made possible.
Finding inspiration in its uncertainty and flux, Vetere’s sculptures rise from the depths of an imaginative sea taking the form of still undiscovered organisms abound with life and colourful vitality. Deep sea mining, industrialised fishing and trawling are destroying habitats even before science has the chance to discover them.
Are we able to extend an ethos of responsivity that expands to the depths of the sea, to creatures we haven’t discovered yet?
Giovanni Vetere
Cystoseira sedoides
2021
Giovanni Vetere
Nitophyllum punctatum
2021
Giovanni Vetere
Laminaria VII
2021
Giovanni Vetere
Cystoseira caespitosa
2021
Giovanni Vetere
Laminaria VIII
2021
Giovanni Vetere
Actinodendron
2021
Watch
Platform - Tides in the Body from Unit London on Vimeo.
Two of the limited-edition photographs presented in the exhibition, on the other hand, are images of Vetere’s long-durational performances, Portrait of the Homo Aquaticus (2018) and Sometimes I think I should be more like a fish (2020).
The performative installations foreground the notion that humans are inseparable from the natural environment, and that the natural environment is not a phenomena “in” which we live but rather is of us, in us and through us. The rain might be felt in an arthritic joint, the sun literally colours our skin, our body is an “atmosphere of flesh”.
Giovanni Vetere
Portrait of the Homo Aquaticus
2018
Giovanni Vetere
Liquid Ground
2019
Giovanni Vetere
Fantasies from the Sea I
2020
Giovanni Vetere
Sometimes I think I should be more like a fish
2020
How we live the world is contingent upon how we imagine the world to be. We need to cultivate an imaginary environment where our bodies and our time are mutually imbricated with our surroundings, that we must live as bodies that extend beyond the human condition.
About the Artist
Giovanni Vetere was born in Rome in 1995 and now lives in London. They graduated from the Fine Arts program of Camberwell College of Arts in 2018.
Although they began their journey with photography and sculpture, they now focus on performance as a means to explore the relationship between humans and nature. Vetere has exhibited in several cities in Europe, including Rome, Florence, The Hague and London. Their most recent projects include the two-person exhibition Tides In The Body, Lychee One, London and the performance Il Cappello del Polpo, Palazzo Massimo, Rome.
In 2019 they were selected to be part of the Midwater Residency in collaboration with Studio Forlane on the island of Poros, Greece. In the same year they exhibited in the Ancient City of Cosa, Ansedonia, for the second chapter of HYPERMAREMMA, The Submerged City. In 2017 they were awarded the Lorenzo Il Magnifico prize at the Florence Biennale in the Performance Art category. In 2021 Vetere will participate in the first edition of the Komi biennial in collaboration with the Pushkin Museum (Moscow, RU) and in the second edition of the contemporary art festival Back to Nature, curated by Costantino d’Orazio in Villa Borghese, Rome.
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