'A Lovely Place' by Oliviero Biagetti at Zona Blu, Milan

A Lovely Place is the final product of the A.I.RE and CU.RE projects, initiated by the Zona Blu association, and takes the form of a solo exhibition by artist Oliviero Biagetti curated by Claudia Caletti. This dialogue proliferates in a heterotopic space, taking the term from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose particular characteristic is that of being connected to all other spaces, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralise or invert the set of relationships that they themselves designate, reflect or mirror. The interest is in what happens when the unreal, the monstrous and otherness make space in the real and how this relates to the surrounding environment, the contaminations that result. For Jean-Paul Sartre, the Other announces itself as a gaze, he does not limit the gaze to the human eye, being looked at is rather the central aspect of being-in-the-world. It is always the gaze that creates suggestions, which are here translated into a solid language, connecting the represented and the host environment. In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote A Report for an Academy. The narrator of the text is an ape who, having learned the language of humans, presents himself before an academy of the most illustrious scientific authorities to explain what human evolution has meant for him. Kafka does not present his process of humanisation as a story of emancipation or liberation from animality, but rather as a passage to the 'cage' of human subjectivity. As Rosi Braidotti recalls in Mothers, Monsters and Machines, teratology, the science of monsters, especially from the end of the 18th century onwards, was motivated by the fear and fascination that they exerted, taking it upon themselves to solve the enigma of normality. The anomalous or abnormal is thus constituted as an abject and yet ubiquitous figure: it is the other that must be avoided at all costs, the one to whom it is forbidden to resemble. Everything is played out on similarity and difference, where the distinctive signs and criteria of differentiation are organs, specific morphologies, of which A Lovely Place becomes the container.