Lorella Paleni
Bio: Born and raised in Casazza, northern Italy. She received her BFA in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice (IT) in 2010. She works with painting, drawing, and animation.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
Why are you interested in the animal?
It always surprises me when someone asks me that. “Why shouldn’t I?” I think. Why would anyone not be interested?
The question of the ‘animal’ is a question that has been met with indifference throughout the course of human history, and not for nothing, since it is out of this ignorance that man has built a world, created truths, scales of values, categories, and priorities. The question of the ‘animal’ is the question of the Other, of Truth/Untruth, of what Human is. The other’s eyes, the other’s face, the other’s world. Not a generic other, nor a generic animal, but this specific animal, this unique form of life and being. It’s an epistemological problem, it undermines society’s structure, hierarchies, and oppression systems; it questions the validity of language. Man is afraid of the ‘animal,’ rightly, because it is the animal that can shake the ground on which man’s castle is built.
“Man is not the center of animal life, just as
earth is not the center of the universe. The human is
but a momentary blip in a history and cosmology that
remains fundamentally indifferent to this temporary
eruption. What kind of new understanding of the humanities
would it take to adequately map this decentering that
places man back within the animal, within nature, and within
a space and time that man does not regulate, understand, or
control? What new kinds of science does this entail? And what
new kinds of art?”
— Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone
“...how miserable, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless
and arbitrary the human intellect appears in nature.
There are eternities in which it did not exist, and when
it has vanished once again, it will have left nothing in
its wake. For the human intellect has no further task
beyond human life. [...] If we could communicate with
a mosquito, we would learn that it, too, flies through
the air with this same pathos, feeling itself to be the
moving center of the entire world.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense