At the heart of this artistic creation is a research oriented toward looking into the relationship between man and his self-representation, in two different directions.
On the one hand, human being's need to create images of themselves and supernatural phenomena: fetishes, sacred icons, puppets and marionettes, up to modern sex dolls.
On the other hand, a tendency to artificially acquire what by nature does not belong to human bodies, with the resort to plastic surgery and the injection of foreign substances into breasts, buttocks, lips, right up to the mirage of human clonation.
A curious phenomenon, known as fata morgana, can be often seen across the Straits of Messina, offering to viewers a different anamorphic vision of the city, hanging and floating in the air, with buildings, cars and people appearing and changing form and, after a short while, vanishing.
This occurs, as we know, because small drops of water act as magnifying lenses, and sunlight completes the work. Messina, the city itself, is not a mirage, it's really there, beyond the Straits, but in these moments people can only watch a motion picture version of it.
The tiny drops of water are the buds of an aesthetic illusion.
And the same is true, somehow, for the drive to modify and improve our body, in the pursuit of the image and likeness of what we think our ideal body should be. No matter how pathetic the results may be, it is always an aesthetic issue, or illusion, which degenerates in mere aestheticism. Indeed, since we all have to die, this sort of motion picture of a healthy and beautiful version of our bodies lasts no more than a mirage.
Just a few moments - enough to change the trajectory of a sun's ray - and the fata morgana effect vanishes. A life - in terms of our bodies.
Science is aware of this to the point of dedicating itself to clonation - from Greek root klon which means, precisily, bud, sprout.
According to Simone Weil, ultimate subject of science is beauty (order, proportion, harmony) that is metaphysical and necessary. Since we have a body, Weil continues, the whole world is organized for this body. To alter the mathematical harmony of the body implies the destruction of the mathematical balance of the world.
The android substitutes man in humble jobs, requiring a certain familiarity with the body, even with creatures programmed to give pleasure, like inflatable dolls, not inflatable anymore, but in latex, and no longer resembling women, but better than women, made for sexual gratification. Just like the fascinating cyborg Joe, interpreted by Jude Law in Kubrick/Spielberg's A.I., a "mecha" (name given to a species of mechanical robots) created to give sexual pleasure to clients.
And just as the motion picture has come to substitute real learning experience (you kiss a girl for the first time after you have seen it done in a movie, that is, you already know how to do it before the experience), in the same way women have come to resemble more and more their rivals in latex, injecting artificial substances in lips and breasts, emulating the effigies of their husbands' erotic dreams.
One can imitate a human being or can make it artificially. This is the field we will investigate, in the pursuit of a story that narrates mankind adrift.
In the novel Never let me go Kazuo Ishiguro tells of a boarding school where cloned children are raised for the purpose of compulsory harvesting of their organs. The strange thing is that the children are trained in art and poetry, and immense and mysterious significance is attributed to their work.
Tiny drops of water on which to project our anxiety.
The passiveness of these young victims in the novel calls to mind, somehow, the manner in which man let himself be devoured.
On the one hand we have a marionette made of wood, like Pinocchio, who wants so much to be a little boy, and on the other hand we have people made of flesh, who recognize the tendency of the limbs to age, and would like to be made of something else - why not? of wood.
The marionette is anthropomorphous, of course, but perhaps before, it is made in the likeness of God, or his Mother. Let's be frank: man needs the Madonna to appear every now and then, in private, and maybe even whisper a secret - that secret will be the text(ure) of our performance.
The Vergin Mary, frequently invoked but rarely conceding herself. She appears only to the innocent eyes of infants (same root as fantocci, puppets), at times confused with fools and idiots, compared to saints in an Eastern tradition. It seems she appeared to Pinocchio in the form of a fairy.
Otherwise, when the Vergin does not reveal herself to the desirous people, they have to be satisfied with a mere representation. Our ancestors actually made little statues of the Vergin, little figures called Mariole, from which comes the French word maryonete.
Paradoxically, in the theatre, a man moves the marionette, as if life on stage were at the same time the enemy that can oppress and the only source of survival.
In a passage from La recherche Proust describes the wickedness of the maid Francoise with the metaphor of the excavator wasp (sphex funerarius). To ensure fresh food for its young after its death, this wasp calls on anatomy to assist its cruelty: having captured weevils and spiders, with extraordinary skills and ability, it pierces their nerve centre controlling the leg movements but not the other vital functions, so to lay its eggs next to the paralyzed insects and provide the larvae, when they hatch, with an easy and inoffensive prey, incapable of resisting or escaping.
Once again, small drops of water to satisfy their children's thirst, tiny and tender sprouts to devour upon awakening.
Now the question is who is the mother and who are the children and, above all, who are the victims condemned to immobility. Surely the nourishment will not be carnal but spiritual, it's the soul that is drawn into a room filled with butterflies with swishing dresses, from which someone took away the dust needed to fly. The butterfly-women fall to the ground and quiver in the motionless desire to fly away. Like the three sisters in Checov. To Moscow! To Moscow! and they stay put.