mutating bodies, imploding stars
with Eglė Budvytytė, Guglielmo Castelli, Raúl de Nieves
+ performance by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins

curated by Samuele Piazza

September 6-17, 2023
Binari 1 e 2, Duomo | free admission
Thursday and Friday, H 6 – 10 PM | Saturday and Sunday, H 10 AM - 8 PM

US SWERVE | performance by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins
Friday, Sept. 15 from 6 to 8 PM,
Saturday, Sept. 16 and Sunday, Sept. 17 from 3 to 5 PM.

We are mutating bodies under an imploding sky, and the group exhibition mutating bodies, imploding stars, curated by Samuele Piazza, offers a profound contemplation on the mutation of human beings within complex ecologies, drawing inspiration from concepts dear to eco-feminism and affect theory.
From September 6 to 17, 2023, Binario 2 at OGR Torino will bring together works ranging from painting to performance, sculpture to video installation, created by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins (Poland/United Kingdom/Germany), Eglė Budvytytė (Lithuania/Netherlands), Guglielmo Castelli (Italy) and Raúl de Nieves (Mexico/United States). Each artist brings their unique perspective to establish thought-provoking connections between the human and the geological realms, igniting a collision between astronomical and biological time.
The exhibition's title, inspired by Eglė Budvytytė's Songs from the Compost, encapsulates its thematic exploration. At its core, the exhibition delves into the profound notions of desire and vulnerability as fundamental elements of human relationships. It embodies a relentless pursuit of understanding symbiosis and interdependent evolution, which serve as the foundation for the emergence of new subjectivities and the profound reconfiguration of our bodies.

Raúl de Nieves presents a series of sculptural works that breathe life into his personal mythology. Drawing from Mexican folklore, he skillfully merges diverse motifs from Catholic tradition and the vibrant queer nightlife scene. These creatures, bursting with color, invite us into a dimension where identities can be redesigned, and new futures imagined. They serve as a bridge between personal and ancestral pasts, inviting us to reconnect with our roots.
Guglielmo Castelli's paintings offer an elegant yet claustrophobic experience. Within his compositions, enigmatic characters negotiate their presence with the edges of the canvas and the objects that saturate the depicted settings. Inspired by literary influences, these figures evoke illustrations from children's stories, resembling dysfunctional paper puppets. Castelli's paintings map out hybrid bodies, compelled to contort, cluster, or move in a manner reminiscent of organic growth.

Songs from the Compost. Mutanting Bodies Imploding Stars - Eglė Budvytytė's video made in collaboration with Marija Olšauskaitė and Julija Steponaitytė amidst the forests and sand dunes of the Neringa Peninsula in Lithuania - follows the movements of a group of performers in a pristine landscape. The protagonists' bodies are in constant motion: crawling on the ground, plunging into water, intertwining with each other. "Hello, I am a cyborg, a symbiote, a non-binary alien...I am a boundary between stone and animal intelligence" reads the song that accompanies their movements.

The opening has started with a Sound Performance by Ramona Ponzini within the OGR Duomo: Oroshi • Asobi • Okuri is a live performance inspired by the tripartite division peculiar to traditional Japanese festivals. Ponzini’s live performance manifests as a modern shamanic sonic ritual, rooted in the Japanese myth of the Celestial Cave. It responds to a deep-seated feeling of restlessness, inviting us to break free from oppressive systems built on destruction, violation, and contamination. The sound installation crafted through the use of voice, wind instruments, small percussion instruments, and vinyl embraces repetition as a ritualistic action, to create a community that shares a deep kind of “feeling” and employs lingering as a transformative tool, reawakening our intensity of perception.

On Friday, Sept. 15 from 6 to 8 p.m. and Saturday, Sept. 16 and Sunday, Sept. 17 from 3 to 5 p.m., the exhibition will feature the performance Us Swerve by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, in the spaces of Binario 1.

In Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ Us Swerve (2014), performers on rollerblades orbit one another while reciting, remixing, and reformulating fragments of poetry that meditate on the subject of desire. This polyphonic choreographic “score” is perpetually altered by the performers’ movements, attitudes, and affects. As the performers circulate, they begin to channel a queer archive of verses and inflections, including lines from writers such as Essex Hemphill, Eileen Myles, and Langston Hughes. These articulations of desire and the sensuality of repetition both set the rollerbladers in motion and create a score for them to move through.