Clarissa Falco

She holds a Masters Degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from NABA. She works, as a visual artist and performer, on issues related to the body reflecting on its condition in a constant dialogue with mechanical elements. Her works start from the idea of the body conceived as a machine, beyond the distinction between subject and object, which is deprived of its appearance to become an engine and gear, part of a machine. In the performative activity, the machine-body binarism is expressed through an automatic gesture of the performers, as if trapped in a time loop that is always the same.

Dialoguing with science and wondering how it deals with the body is what moves Clarissa interest in the machinic element. With the term machine she is not referring only to the structure but also to the ethical, social, political and cultural practices that affect us. But what are the political, ethical, social and aesthetic limits of the body? Contemporary culture has shifted the focus of hybridization from high-tech laboratories to popular culture. Science fiction and horror literature (and cinema) contribute to developing this theme, underlining their ability to record our lives changes. The consolidated success of horror and sci-fi genres are a symptom of a new phenomenon that prefers the deviant, or the mutant, over the more conventional versions of the human being. Precisely for this reason, they provide us with appropriate cultural representations of these changes and transformations. In her artistic practice, Clarissa wants to get out of the putrefied imagination where the beauty of the anomalous body was not designed to move towards a representation of the subject that underlines the urgency to think about the unity of the body-machine.