Error MRI

Printing on aluminum 100x100, imagines of abdominal MRI scan and digital drawing, 2019.

The mediation of technologies in the contemporary world participates in the construction and restructuring of relationships between the individual, time, space, memory and identity.

The work hinges on the concept of corporeity as a relationship between the diagnostic body and the symbolic body. On the one hand the body is understood as a subjective presence, as a profound unity of the living body of a human being, an intertwining of self-awareness and openness to others. On the other hand the body is considered a simple object. 

The images detected in a scientific-technological environment create a perceptual disconnect regarding self-awareness and self-representation. A sort of interpretative error, an existential question, a short circuit that deactivates the way we place our body in the world and within us. Error was born as an alienating reaction to MRI.

The equipment shows profiles and thicknesses of bones and internal organs, creating an emotional and visual detachment from the perception and knowledge of one's body; they are diagnostic photographs that observe "the interior" with scientific rigor, summarizing it to the point of making it, in some sequences, abstract and unrecognizable.

And it is in this experience, in this "not recognizing oneself" that the picture emerges. Following the abstract traces of a body that I don't recognize as mine has allowed me to discover it as a symbol and to meet for the first time what I had never seen before.

The work also wants to refer to the investigation of the concept of the eternal dualism between exterior and interior, soul and body, unconscious and conscious, macroscopic, microscopic, objective and subjective reality. The body reduced to a pure organism is no more real than the psychological or spiritual soul. Both result from that 'idealistic' abstraction of the soul with all its religious, moral, psychological variations, and the 'materialistic' abstraction of the body with its biological and sociological extensions. As long as science continues to consider the body as an object, as an aggregate of parts, we will be unable to understand anything about the body and life.

The images were arranged in series and assembled together, to refer conceptually to a tabular order classifying diseases, which reduces the bodies of sick people into alpha-numerical codes, depriving them of identity. The arrangement is not random but numbered and should be read as a progressive and growing introspection. The choice to assemble the sequences in a single image shows on one hand the desire to standardize the depersonalizing photographic fragmentation of each single portion of the body created by MRI and on the other hand to bring the body back to art as a unicum, concentrating the gaze of the viewer on the entire content of the work.