An anthropologist by training, he combines research related to his previous studies, updated on instances and urgencies that open up to socio-environmental perspectives and material recycling. He works by recovering objects, industrially manufactured products, images and data from the internet. His work approach, focused on found material, aims to investigate the possibilities of experimenting and sharing another social and existential reality, restoring an animistic relationship with the environment, other living beings, the matter. He puts at the center of his discourse a different ontology, in contrast to the hyper-technologization and transhumanization towards which the new millennium is tending. Through his installations he invites to reflect on the crises of contemporaneity and to build alternative imaginaries in which fantasy is not imprisoned by consumerism.
ENRICO SCAPINELLI
“Enrico Scapinelli develops his artistic process around the recovery of materials in a twofold sense: on the one hand, he recycles images from the web, on the other hand, his field of investigation is linked to ecology, against waste and a return to respect for nature. He also focuses in particular on the climate crisis, investigating through the use of various media: video, sculpture, painting, photography, news, information, sector studies that are brought back to a shared attention and sensitivity. His work uses existing images following the logic of “aesthetic degrowth”, as Nicolas Bourriaud calls it in Inclusions. Aesthetics of the Capitalocene, that is to say the system of reuse and recycling, that encompasses art, fashion, economics and in fact all spheres of human action, is opposed to the bulimia of spectacular aesthetic hyperproduction, to the overproduction of advertising images. Images found on the web are used following the idea of postproduction, also identified by Bourriaud in his successful essay Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Art makes use of material that is already available and then, with appropriate manumissions and “détournements”, it constructs a new work with an unusual form and meaning”.
Carmen Lorenzetti
“Scapinelli's poetics is configured as research aimed at highlighting the socio-political and environmental effects of consumerism and hypertechnologisation, adopting – and at the same time sabotaging – the very visual language of the agencies that have institutionalized its aesthetics. A critique that takes shape through a practice based on the recovery and transformation of industrial and natural materials, reassembled to challenge the imaginary of production and progress”.
Margherita Arduini Heuberger