Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries (LAB)

Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries (LAB) is conceived as an experimental laboratory that fosters innovative synergies between art and ethnography, exploring the potential of a knowledge that transcends traditional disciplinary confines. Drawing inspiration from the arts, social sciences, and humanities, LAB positions itself as a space of convergence and hybridisation, where interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations can generate novel approaches to exploring and representing the myriad dimensions of the world. These dimensions—human and non-human, animate and inanimate, material and immaterial—can be experienced, felt, and imagined, yet they rarely find adequate expression through purely textual or single-disciplinary methods.

LAB does not merely “occupy the margins” of disciplines; it actively challenges conventional boundaries, transforming them into spaces of exchange, tension, and innovation. Rather than striving for a precarious equilibrium between anthropology and art, its aim is to unveil the epistemological, aesthetic, and political fractures that emerge from their encounter. Exploring these margins entails opening up new avenues of research, venturing into uncharted territory, and engaging in continuous dialogue with an ever-evolving landscape. This dynamic, processual approach, rooted in a collective and socially engaged vision, champions a living anthropology and a critical art that question established conventions and paradigms.

LAB is committed to supporting experiments that meld emotion, sensoriality, and imagination with rigorous theoretical and methodological depth. The collaborations emerging from this space not only seek to produce new forms of knowledge, but also to create inclusive, evocative, and transformative modes of expression. Embracing the notion that research is not a conclusive act but an open, evolving process, LAB encourages practices that transcend mere representation by incorporating performativity, evocation, and materiality as essential elements of anthropological and artistic inquiry.

We invite curators, artists, anthropologists, and researchers from all fields to contribute methodological explorations, transdisciplinary collaborations, and experimental projects that challenge disciplinary boundaries and embrace more dynamic and open modes of knowledge production. LAB stands as a generative space where the dialogue between art and anthropology serves not only as an investigative tool, but also as an ethical and political practice for imagining alternative worlds and confronting the challenges of our time.

Curator 2025: Marco Maria Zanin

The LAB inaugurates with the curation of Italian artist, researcher, and activist Marco Maria Zanin. Born in Padua in 1983, Zanin's work explores the intersections of contemporary art, anthropology, and community engagement. His research focuses on the relationships between human beings and their territories, emphasising an intercultural approach that values practices and rituals capable of strengthening the bonds between communities and their environments. His work seeks to place life, in all its forms, at the centre of artistic and anthropological reflection, examining how artefacts, rituals, and craft can foster deep connections between communities and their lands.

With a background in Modern Literature and International Relations, Zanin is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at ISCTE/NOVA University in Lisbon. His thesis, entitled “Potencialidades na Fronteira entre Arte e Artefato” [Potentialities at the Frontier between Art and Artefact], investigates the limits and intersections between artistic practices and cultural objects. His works are part of prestigious public and private collections, including MART (Rovereto), Museu Morandi, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Fondazione Brodbeck, Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo, MAM in Rio de Janeiro, and Salsali Museum in Dubai.

In 2015, Zanin founded Humus Interdisciplinary, a platform dedicated to creating artistic residencies that connect artists with rural communities in the Veneto region. Humus focuses on the reinterpretation of local identities through artistic collaborations and cultural revitalisation initiatives. By integrating contemporary art into marginalised rural contexts, Zanin promotes community development and fosters a deeper awareness of the complex relationship between human life and territory.

Through his artistic practice and research, Zanin underscores the importance of creating new relational paradigms that bridge the gaps between art, craft, and community traditions. These intersections serve to foster sociocultural healing and reconnection in the face of modern fragmentation. By linking contemporary art, anthropology, and the role of ethnographic museums, his work reflects on art as a transformative tool for reanimating historical objects and engendering intercultural dialogue. Positioned at the confluence of multiple disciplines and assuming various roles, Zanin reimagines the ethnographic museum as a dynamic space where art, craft, and intercultural connections converge to promote a new understanding of heritage and address broader social issues related to identity, belonging, and cultural restitution.

Conversazioni Barbaricine / Part 3 — A situated anthropology of making: notes and reflections

Artisan, artist, threshold

In the way Gesuino speaks about his making, the distinction between artist and artisan loses substance. The artisan is not a technical executor but someone who inhabits an unmediated relationship with matter – a continuity between knowing, doing, and living. The word “artist,” which feels foreign to him, appears instead as a fixed identity, a social position that stiffens the gesture.

In his experience, making does not begin with an idea but with the body: a shift in the air, a texture, an internal movement. This resonates with Ingold’s sense of knowing from within, where form is not a mental prefiguration but something discovered through movement, touch, and attention.

His self-definition – “artisan” – works as a protective device: a way to keep making aligned with life itself, without slipping into the representational distance he associates with “art.” He lives on a threshold where life and form co-emerge.

Apparition, revelation, material agency

When he describes the moment, a figure appears inside a root or a piece of bone, he never speaks of invention or imagination. The form “was already there.” He did not create it – he recognized it.

This sense of revelation, present in many artisanal and ritual traditions, offers an alternative model of creativity. Form arises from encounter, not intention. Matter behaves as an interlocutor: it suggests, orients, and sometimes insists.

This echoes the critiques of hylomorphism in Ingold and the material engagement perspective (Malafouris), where materials do not receive form but actively participate in its emergence.
When Gesuino speaks of “the gift,” he is naming this relational dynamic: the form does not belong to him. It happens between him and the material, in a shared perceptual field. Revelation becomes a mode of knowing – intuitive, immediate, embodied.

An ethic of minimal intervention

His repeated insistence on “not adding and, if possible, not removing” points to a relational ethic rather than an aesthetic principle. Each piece has its own natural trajectory, which must be respected.

The story of the stream diverted by his neighbour illustrates this worldview: when the course of things is forced, the land retaliates. This is not a moral metaphor but a practical cosmology.

This minimal ethic – a blend of restraint, listening, and caution – echoes animist relational ontologies described by Descola, where the world is not made of passive objects but of presences with inclinations and histories.

In practice, it becomes a technique: intervene only to allow the form already embedded in the material to surface. Avoid correcting, avoid dominating, avoid “improving.” Making becomes a technique of letting-be.

Garden and art as complementary ecologies

Spending time with him makes it clear that the garden and sculpture are not separate activities but two sides of the same ecological regime.

The garden provides physiological grounding: rhythms, soil, cycles, the sensory stability of tending to plants. Sculpture, instead, regulates the interior landscape: images, memories, intuitions.

The two operate like complementary regulators – one consolidates, the other releases.

In anthropology of making, this intertwining reflects the intimate link between material action and well-being: flourishing not as a moral abstraction but as a pragmatic condition of life.

The garden restores presence; sculpture restores vision. Both follow the same logic: removing excess, simplifying, re-establishing breath.

An economy of gesture and refusal of productivity

He works in short episodes, never pushing beyond the threshold of joy. When the hand stiffens or the gesture risks becoming automatic, he stops. He changes activity, shifts attention, comes back later.

This alternation is not distraction: it is protection. It keeps the gesture fresh, preventing the slide into compulsion or productivity-driven repetition.

Serial production – producing often, producing many – is completely foreign to him.

This echoes Sennett’s view of craft, where quality emerges not from accumulation but from the integration of work into the rhythms of life.

The fragmentation of his practice is not a flaw but a strategy of care.

The poetics of the humble

His reflections on Sardinian poetry reveal an aesthetic principle that also shapes his sculpture: form must speak simply. The “poor rhyme” is a way of staying inside the world rather than above it.

In his wooden figures, the same principle returns: no idealization, no corrective symmetry.

Long noses, crooked mouths, unbalanced faces – these are not naïve accidents, but a refusal to “fix” reality.

It aligns with Bataille’s idea of the informe: forms that embrace the brokenness of existence rather than hide it.

For him, the imperfect form is the true form. The humble is not a genre – it is a criterion of authenticity.

Vision, intuition, and reading the world

When he says he sees what others do not, it is not a boast but a description of a cultivated attention. He observes everything: every protrusion in the wood, every fold in a stone, every tension in a face.

There is a divinatory quality in this gaze: matter emits signals that he interprets instantly. Not symbolically, but perceptually.

This posture recalls Favret-Saada’s notion of being “caught” in a field of forces: experience is not about belief but involvement.

His vision operates as an extended sense, an antenna. The figures are not sought – they arrive. Intuition is not the opposite of reason; it is a form of embodied reasoning.

Light trance, suspended time, clarity of gesture

While working, he enters a suspended state: “I don’t think, I don’t remember, I’m elsewhere.” Time stretches.

This resembles what many traditions describe as ordinary trance: a mild form of absorption that lets the hand move without interference.

In contemporary psychology it would be called flow, but here it feels more ritualistic – a way to step momentarily outside the pressures of ordinary life.

Suspended time becomes a space for moral decompression: a clearing where life lightens and the material becomes permeable.

A critique of recognition

When he talks about visibility and invisibility among local artists, his analysis is sharp: recognition does not follow value but networks, circulation, and narrative.

He does not dwell in resentment; he observes. No indignation, no victimhood.

This echoes the dynamics of reputation and symbolic capital described by Bourdieu: the field distributes recognition according to positions, not intrinsic merit.

His strategy is withdrawal: protect the gesture by avoiding the competitive logic of the field.

Visibility, if it comes, must not deform the life that sustains the work.

House, fire, and conviviality

Eating together, sitting by the fire, sharing sleep – these are not peripheral acts but part of a relational ecology in which making takes shape.

The shared meal, especially food prepared by hand, is a device that creates alignment and trust. Life and work are not separated; conviviality is the medium in which the gesture becomes possible.

This recalls forms of productive conviviality described by Sennett, where the social environment does not result from work but enables it.

The form born in such a space carries the texture of the relation: gestures exchanged, atmospheres shared, rhythms synchronised.

Gift, value, and non-alienability

Some objects circulate easily; others cannot circulate at all.

This distinction does not follow aesthetic criteria but affective ones: an object can be given only if it does not contain too much of a life, too much of a wound.

It aligns with Maussian gift economies, where objects carry relations and not just value.

The mask with Amerigo’s hair cannot be sold “not even for a thousand euros” because the object contains a living remainder of the person. It is a secular relic.

Non-alienability becomes a property of certain forms: they cannot be uprooted without breaking something essential.

Evil, empirical spirituality, protection

Objects made “against evil” do not belong to symbolic rhetoric. They function as devices of protection. Evil is described as a force, not an idea.

Episodes of trance, visions, or sudden intuitions are narrated without mystical decoration: they are facts. His spirituality is empirical – event-based, not doctrinal.

This is close to Favret-Saada’s account of being “taken” by forces that exceed explanation: involvement rather than belief.

Material practice becomes a technique for managing these forces: diverting, containing, neutralising.

Matter becomes an ally; the sculpture is not representation but operation.

Happiness as a method

When he says he has already reached his goal – “to live happy” — he is not speaking of emotion but of a daily regimen held together by discipline and restraint.

Happiness is maintained through micro-gestures: avoiding pride, apologising when needed, refusing grudges, not feeding thoughts that suffocate.

This resembles ethical traditions that treat the “art of living” as a set of exercises.

Happiness is not a feeling but a minimum condition of balance, a lightness that allows the gesture to remain unburdened.

Wound, relational justice, transformation

Stories of theft, betrayal, and abandonment are not elaborated as trauma but as part of the ordinary structure of life. Human wrongdoing is expected; what matters is not letting it shape the inner landscape.

Making becomes a technique of transformation: it does not erase the wound but gives it form, a place, a distance.

Many of his most charged sculptures seem to function as containment devices: they hold what cannot be resolved.

In embodiment theory, this resonates with notions of somatic transmutation: the body works through what thought cannot process.

The work becomes a second skin that absorbs the roughest part of experience.