Modello ecotonale di difesa

The work presents itself as a liminal figure, a marine scarecrow that has emerged from a briny imagination to occupy the exhibition space. The body consists of an interweaving of knotted nautical rope – a material normally used for work and mooring – which here loses its practical purpose to become an organic structure: a skeletonless torso, a restrained mass.
From the tangle emerge soft, multiplied human limbs, devoid of anatomical hierarchy. Arms and legs are arranged like remains washed ashore by the current, evoking a fragmented, post-human corporeality. The figure does not stand upright: it is supported, exposed, almost held in place by its own construction.
At the centre, the shark clasped between the arms introduces the symbolic core of the work: a relic of an exploited ecosystem, a mute body that transforms the grip into an ambiguous gesture — somewhere between capture, protection and sacrificial display.
The hanging baits — food for birds — trigger a further shift. A typical feature of the scarecrow’s function, here it does not repel but nourishes, does not drive away but attracts and retains. The figure thus occupies an ecological threshold between sea and sky, where food chains and defensive roles are altered.
What emerges is a fragile totem, an ineffective guardian of a compromised environment. The scarecrow no longer protects a fertile territory, but bears witness to an imbalance: between human and animal, between function and failure, between what it should safeguard and what it can now only expose.

Technique: Assemblage of 6.60 metres of nautical rope, anthropomorphic limbs made of fabric and polymers, a 95cm stuffed shark, a wooden table, bird bait/food
Dimensions: approx. 1.10 × 60

Exhibited in: Scarecrow, curated by Alessandro Bulgini and Christian Caliandro, FlashBack Habitat, Turin