Andrea Amadei
The publication is available in its entirety as a PDF document. Download below.
Giambattista Vico's "bestione" from his Scienza Nova epitomises a profound transformation in humanity post-divine retribution of the Great Flood. This "bestione," a providential design, metamorphosed human beings into "gigantic and immensely strong" entities solely to ensure their own survival, sacrificing what we might now term their "cognitive faculties." The bestione, therefore, exists in a liminal space between man and beast, not in an evolutionary sense, but as a humanity degraded by its own failings to a state of existence not fully illuminated by reason. Vico refers to this epoch in human history, spanning from the onset of the Great Flood to the "first lightning" that heralds the end of divine punishment, as the "feral wandering" or "the night of names." In Vico's historical reconstruction, this period, extending over two centuries, was indispensable for the creation of the humanity we recognise today.
I have long been captivated by the concept of the "bestione." I acknowledge the challenge of disentangling its interpretation from an evolutionary framework that tempts one to equate the "bestione" with the Neanderthal, viewing it as a "missing link" between human and animal. However, I discern within the concept of the "bestione" an ambiguous, dual nature, demonic in essence, reminiscent of fallen and lost angels, luciferian in a sense, resonating with extreme contemporaneity and interest. It encapsulates a complex narrative of haunting shadows and unrelenting clarity, of lights cast down and later unearthed, concealed reflections.
This liminality holds a magnetic allure and simultaneously instills unease within me. The shadowy, the nebulous, the chaotic, the not-yet, and the no-longer are, in a very Christian recognition, errors or, at best, partial moments of an evolving path, incompletions. In my daily life, they make me uncomfortable and irritate me. However, I perceive in this restless motility a fertile region of existence, a realm where liberation from the rigour of our densely layered awareness — of our immediate surroundings and the far reaches of the world, every moment, all the time (information overloading) — intersects with the abyss of its absence, like a slightly higher step when running down the stairs. In this irregularity lies something exhilarating, a glitch that shifts your attention to a different level of being in the world, revealing myriad unnoticed details. It induces a vertigo that transforms the stairway you were descending into discrete steps, each suddenly demanding caution; that makes you acutely conscious of your body's weight, precisely at the moment it seems on the verge of collapsing to the ground.
Over the years, I have encountered certain corners of the world where isolation and protection, familiarity and abyss, converged within the person I am, manifesting as a certain positive emotional disposition. These were not extraordinary places, just sufficient to pause for a moment, and then another moment, and yet another, year after year, always in the same place.
These corners of the world were fragments of woodland and stretches of sea, places without a definitive spot to stay, accustomed only to transitory passages, or often not even that. I felt like an ambivalent guest, both custodian and explorer, without signal, without network, without state, and without time. In these moments, occasionally, I experienced the aforementioned vertigo, in the clear form of a certain fear — of a wild boar, or a wolf, or the darkness falling too quickly, and if it rains, not being able to return in time — and I would try to delve into it.
There I was, in those places, spending hours pretending, in my way, to be a "bestione" for play, a game of individual cosmogonic narration. I attempted to occupy the space and make room for my thoughts, for new thoughts, striving to inhabit the space as they might have. My simple "being" transformed, my gaze strived to become ever more primitive, to forget, to relinquish the things I was seeing, letting them drift from my sight and rediscovering what lay beneath — beneath the leaves, the trees, the undergrowth and branches, the stones, shrubs, ferns, and nettles, the acorns and chestnuts and their burrs. What was the forest like before we assigned a purpose to each part, and thus a name that defined it so precisely, what was the forest like during "the night of names"? In this manner, the forest, from a collection of precisely named objects (branch, tree, leaf), becomes a flux of lights and shadows, of soft and moist, warm and cool; it becomes a resting place when one is tired, a haunting spirit when darkness falls. And the landscape before you likewise vanishes and flows in changing and continuous forms, suggested presences, calls and confusion, new signs that one does not quite know how to name, frequent sensations of disorientation and fear. Beneath all the things of the forest, ultimately, there is just me, my perceptions of it.
I would then wonder, again for play, what I would do in that moment of confusion if I were a bestione attacked by a wild boar. This created a starting point, a beginning from which to attempt to bring order to that vast confusion. From this point, arbitrarily placed within the chaos that was the forest with no more names where I found myself, I would begin to reconstruct the forest anew. I started from what I could see around me, which was no longer a piece of "forest" but a piece of anonymous world — and which, with a bit more exercise, would become not even a piece or part, but all that there is, one moment at a time.
Gradually, the confusion of the world, rendered nothing to my eyes, would settle. At a certain point, that continuous, boiling flux of light and dark, of warm and cool, sharp and soft, would start to coalesce more clearly — typically by chance: a ray of sunlight piercing the dense foliage of spring and falling precisely there, on that branch, on that stone. That ray of sunlight would bring forth a stone from the underbrush, making me aware of it, and this would become, to my eyes of a fleeing man, a weapon to grasp and throw, seemingly made just for that purpose, fitting perfectly in my hand.
During each of these sessions, I capture hundreds of photographs, often dozens upon dozens of the same subject, the same tree, the same stone. I strive to photograph that specific "mode" of light striking the stone, that particular manner, among the infinite possibilities, which elevates that very stone, that branch, that trunk, from the rest of the forest and brings it to my attention: the light and shadow enveloping it, changing with the hour of the day, the season of the year, from near, from afar. Then, I review the photographs taken over time.
In every photograph, there exists a representational dimension, constituting the rational facet of the image: we perceive a photograph capturing a segment of the world, and within the image, we discern elements of the "real world" (a tree, a branch, a horse). However, among a hundred photographs of the same subject (the same tree, the same horse), certain images are more aesthetically gratifying than others. This difference is purely aesthetic and unrelated to the "subject" the photographs portray: each photograph represents the same tree. Hence, we infer that the aesthetic pleasure derived from viewing a photograph is not inherently linked to its representational aspect. This suggests that within every photograph, there resides another dimension, transcending its representational aspect and existing independently of it. I asked myself: what makes an image aesthetically pleasing?
The aim of my process is to dissociate the representational character of the photograph (the "subject" depicted in the photograph) from the pure image (considered as a non-representational rhythm of colours, lights, shadows, shapes: a rhythm I conveniently term the "fundamental aesthetic structure”). The challenge is to see beyond the mere subject and engage with the deeper, often elusive, aesthetic essence that each image embodies.
After selecting a photograph, I focus on specific visual aspects: I trace the lights and shadows, using different colours, distinguish cool tones from warm tones, identify the primary forms determining its visual balance. The result is a series of independent layers, each a stylisation of an aspect of the original photograph. Through this process, I achieve varying degrees of abstraction, depending on the photograph's complexity, until I feel I have, in some way, identified what I call the "fundamental aesthetic structure": the image irrespective of representation, akin to squinting to see better.
To me, this represents the "truth" of a particular photograph, though I use the term "truth" in a very superficial sense. This truth is subjective, yet not in a relativistic way where everyone has their own “personal truth”. The truth of the fundamental aesthetic structure is an accidental truth, valid only to the extent that it operates and functions effectively: truth by play and by chance, yet profoundly true nonetheless because it is a principle of order brought into the world, according to which the world then actually reveals itself to your eyes as to mine - it works! It is that light that illuminated a stone in that particular "mode" to create something new before my eyes, something that was not there before, the stone-weapon for a bestione fleeing from a wild boar, and that similarly illuminates a person's face in such a way that makes you say, "yes, hold still for a moment, I'll take a photo — now." And that photo will please you and will please others, because "there was a beautiful light.” That very light, in its unique "mode" of illumination, unveils previously unnoticed details, commanding your attention: it moves you, captures your eye, and delights you — in other words, it is beautiful.
This aspect of images and objects, purely aesthetic and non-rational, constitutes for me the domain of the sacred, the mysterious, the poetic (poiesis), the metaphorical and the symbolic, embodying the quintessence of human experience. My research work is directed towards exploring this domain, motivated by a pressing political imperative: contemporary society relentlessly quantifies, analyzes, and rationalizes every occurrence. In the absence of "data" substantiating a thesis, that thesis is relegated to insignificance. Such an approach systematically overlooks the domain of aesthetic experience: this neglected space is where the true essence of our existence is revealed, beyond the reach of empirical scrutiny. Everything that governs and directs our actions, our decisions, and therefore the broadest human trends, inhabits the space between one number and another, the silence between words, the "night of names”.
In this perspective, Vico’s concept of the “bestioni” might take on a fertile existential role. Rather than interpreting them as a historical phase in human evolution or a mere design of Providence, we might instead view them as an ontological mode of being, perpetually active within us: beings of immense strength and significance, who, despite their silence, express themselves through joy and rage, surprise and fury, emotion.
Engaging with Vico’s “bestioni” thus becomes an exploration of the primordial forces that dwell in the interstices of our rational existence. These forces guide us toward pathways for understanding how we attempt to name the ineffable — names that may shift between “sacred” and “beauty,” yet always strive to articulate the unspoken essence of what binds us as human.
Mythopoeic in nature, the “bestione” represents a persistent, underlying current shaping our sensory and emotional experiences. It compels us to confront the profound and often paradoxical truths of our nature — those facets that elude logical categorization yet deeply influence our perceptions and actions. In this sense, the aesthetic pursuit becomes an attempt to uncover the mysteries of this intrinsic movement between the spoken and the enacted, in search of that silence that follows when, all together, we find ourselves agreeing — look, how beautiful!
Comment 1
The liminality, both temporal and physical, serves as a starting point for this reflection on an ontological concept that, according to the artist, is inherent to the human being, the “bestione.” This concept allows for various considerations within an interesting gradient of abstraction.
In different moments that recount the aesthetic experience, we can recognize the different stages:
First, the association with places and non-places (the physical forest) that become containers of undefined concepts (literally 'undefined', without definition). Then, the shift towards sensations that blend and blur together (the ‘flow of lights and shadows, of softness and moisture, warmth and coolness’). This is followed by an attempt to bring order to the confusion of the world and add awareness of things, of subjects—a return to the reality of definitions—triggered by an imaginary danger. This urgency makes it necessary to focus one’s gaze and reconsider every single element, in a nearly pointillist selection. Thus, it is in the liminal space (of definition, of the object’s detail, of the reiteration of the observed particular) that the dominance of the aesthetic experience manifests itself, governed by the ‘bestione,’ which at that moment, like a hegemonic Ego in the ‘confederation of souls’ described by Antonio Tabucchi, takes over.
The ‘bestioni’ remain silent until (perhaps unconsciously?) they are called upon to express themselves in an artistic choice that is not logical but instinctive and, according to the artist, they represent that primordial part responsible for aesthetic judgments.
However, one might wonder if, in turn, the artist’s aesthetic experience is filtered through a background of studies composed of numbers and well-defined terms, and if the process of reviewing specific visual aspects results instead in a synthesis at a glance of measurable factors. Perhaps this complex selection and analysis (so well articulated) of the photographs is actually the result of a fruitful collaboration with the ‘bestione’ in a perfect fusion of reason and instinct.
Comment 2