ambracastagnettihome

My works depict an alternative world inhabidet by multifaceted beings, in which the human presence does not lead to an anthropocentric-driven system, but to a more horizontal co-presence in which the elements merge into each other. This fictional ecosystem does not assume an utopic peaceful world, being it inspired by the blind rage of nature and of human desire, but it simply embedds different relations of cause and effect. The tender matter and shape of natural, animal and feminine universes is protected by metallic shields, reveiling both their fragile and everlasting nature, which leads them to become strong but sensitive witnesses of their own environment.
This ecosystem is constellated of cognizant and ungendered yet non-active presences, somehow crystalized in an endless contemplation, all connected by a higher consciousness. Time does not exist the way we perceive it, it is stiffen in images. As Gaston Bachelard would say, memory is the theatre of our past, and the time we suppose to know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of our stability. Space encloses and compresses time in its thounsands of cells: the calendar of our lives can only be set in its system of images. Hence, if we conceive time through images, it is also possible to think different relations between these images.

My sculptural practice is strongly rooted in the processes, ranging between tracing directly from the object, thus creating a matrix, and modeling a shape ex novo. The constant use of bones and animal skulls led me to the process of over-modeling directly on the objects, permitting the “processual invention” in which the skull is not the “defective, imperfect object anymore - as described by Bataille in his book about Lauscaux caves - which somehow kept on being that particular deceased man, even without being it anymore”, but it becomes vessel for a dialectic game open to plastic invention: game of shape and countershape, similarity and dissimilarity, figuration and disfiguration.
On the other side the process of modeling from raw matter (and of drawing) meets the necessity of the thought to imagine its experience of the above, always connected to a mysterious initiation to the world below. Drawing is not just measuring and taking notes, it is a response, as John Berger said. In the moment the glance reaches a certain point, we notice an equally intense energy coming towards us, through the appearence of what we are sifting through.