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 2 – Fragments of an ongoing dialogue

Marco Maria Zanin

MMZ: I have to tell you, in my view what you’re doing has real value. I mean real human value. You bring a story, a narrative that’s incredibly precious. And today we need to keep some threads together, because we’re also gathering material.

GC: You’re the master here. I just like to talk.

MMZ: The goal is to try, together, to tell something that matters. And in my opinion, that value lies deeply in the pieces you make, in who you are, in your story. So what we’re doing here is a small cultural operation.

GC: We’re doing something good for you all. I’m happy.

MMZ: Why do you say “for you” and not “for us”?

GC: Because I feel part of it. Because I live in a sort of happiness, and I don’t know if one day I’ll be seen or recognized. So I don’t fool myself about what might happen.

It depends on you, not on me. I’m here collaborating. If one day you rejoice, I’ll rejoice too.

I take part with great joy. I shared a good lunch, a beautiful day like yesterday, and tomorrow is another day – something more, not something less.

GC: I say what I think, just like that, in simplicity. Maybe I don’t speak Italian very well. For me it’s not important to speak Italian well, I never studied it.

I went to fifth grade, and I did the second and third grade when I was three years old. Then I left, just to say. But I see things – all the things that belong to the earth, the things that get thrown away.

Because I come from a world, from a completely dark dimension, where some paranormal things happened to me, and so I entered a dimension where I see things differently from others. It’s not easy to get inside me, from the outside, because someone might say: “What the hell is he talking about?” They might think it’s ignorance. But if a person says, “No, look, I believe in God,” and I say, “But have you touched Him with your own hands? Why do you believe in God? Because you go to church? Because your father taught you? Or because something happened to you? Or maybe you just believe in that because you’re a child of nature – but then, if you’re the child of a poor man, God is not enough.”

MR: And listen, this general theme of spirituality, this thing you call God – how do you connect it to your art?

GC: I connect it because things come to me like this, the vision of something appears to me already made, and so I know it’s not me. Did Michelangelo go to school? I don’t know, I don’t think so, because I don’t know Michelangelo’s story.

But I think that the artists of the past, the ones who had no schooling and did paranormal things – it wasn’t by their own hand. No, no, it wasn’t their hand, it was God’s hand they had, because they saw the vision, they had the vision, just like I have the vision. Of course I’m not a painter, but I can make things that are invented and created by me.

MR: If you had to, let’s say, describe all the phases of how you work with wood and stone sculpture – focusing on that – how would you put it?

GC: Well, in my nature, I take that log.

MR: But let’s start earlier. How do you end up taking that log and not another one?

GC: Because I don’t go looking for things, you understand? I see them. I’m walking, I look at a wall, and my eye goes straight there.

MR: But is there something that happens?

GC: It happens to me, of course something happens that pulls me to look right there, because that’s where the gift is. The gift. It’s not like if I walk out of here, go to that wall, and say, “Oh fuck, I’d like to make a beautiful ten-metre snake.”

And I would do it – I don’t know how I would do it, you see? It’s already created, it’s already created inside me. How should I build it? With an iron soul running all through it? I have this ability: whatever I want to create.

MR: And so you don’t do it?

GC: No, you mustn’t have that kind of thought, because it puts you in doubt. I don’t have those problems of saying, “Ah, maybe this would be better… maybe I should change it so it gets seen more… maybe make it more refined,” because today a lot of people look for perfection in everything. I don’t want that.

I want the things I like, because this is my gift – to see what has been given to me. You understand me?

GC: It’s not that I lived for that, but some things came to me – things that maybe wouldn’t have come at another moment. So at the right moment, in my oasis, something different had to arrive.

(Here he’s talking about when me and Michele were looking at that olive root he started working on.)

And then I saw another one, again – every little piece – and he saw them too. Had we seen it before? No, we hadn’t seen it, but it was there. That’s a gift, it’s a present that that natural root gave us.

But someone might say, “No, things aren’t like that.”
Then it means you won’t make anything out of it anymore.
Don’t take nature away.

Don’t take away the nature of what nature gives you.
You can’t add to it, and if possible you shouldn’t even take anything away.
It was already there – the eyes were already there, the nose was there.

GC: Because Michelangelo didn’t have flair. He had the gift. Because he had visions when he climbed up there. In the colours, in the expressions, in the suffering.
Instead, flair is something a bit constructed.
No – flair is constructed, the gift is not constructed.
The gift is something different. That’s what I think.
And I would like to discuss this with people of great competence. Because competence isn’t what you’ve studied. Competence is understanding well what something is, who I am, who you are.

The difference between you and me.
Between flair and the gift.
You say flair, and I tell you gift.

So, I’m telling you: what I live is a gift; yours is flair.
Let’s put them side by side.
Let’s take something that has nothing. And I’ll show you what flair is and what the gift is. I’ll show you. The difference.

MMZ: I was referring to the gift also in your way of giving.

GC: That’s another gift. That’s a gift. But I’m talking about this one. Because the gift of giving is something that enriches you. Instead, doing things out of necessity, to survive – that’s necessity. And that’s something completely different.
Because with the gift, you take something that has nothing and you build.

Flair, instead, always looks for better materials. The best tools. It’s another thing.

With a screwdriver, with whatever I find that nature gives me, I manage to do things that others cannot do. Why? That’s the difference. Because I use techniques of the hands.

Techniques with anything that has nothing. And I give even that something, and I manage to work it. And that is a gift.

Flair is something else. Flair always looks for the finest woods.
I, instead, take the most miserable thing the earth gives me, and from there I draw the good.

You understand? All right.

First he draws it, and then he makes it. I don’t use a pencil.
He uses flair, and I use the gift.

That’s the difference.
He’s an excellent draftsman, down to every tiny line and detail.
I use nothing.

I, instead, take it, start, and everything appears. That is the gift.
This is the difference.

Gift and flair. And maybe many people don’t know it.
And I would discuss it with the best, with anyone in the world.

MMZ: As an artist, but also as a curator, as an anthropologist – in short, as a researcher – I’d really like to bring things like this into a contemporary art context. And I found Gesuino’s work really interesting… and he himself is a very interesting person.

But, you know, the moment this kind of work enters a contemporary art space, it also becomes important to share something about who Gesuino is and the world he comes from.

So I’ve prepared a whole series of questions. There are many of them, so we’ll just go through some.

For example: you, Gesuino – do you see yourself more as an artist or as a craftsman? I mean, if someone says to you: “I see you as a craftsman, or I see you as an artist”, how do you…?

GC: I say I’m a craftsman, because I come from the world of craftsmen, even though the way I work today is completely different from what I had in me before.

This… I could call it “grace” or “gift” – then of course everyone can interpret it in their own way, right?
I was lucky enough to discover my qualities at a moment in life when I’d hit rock bottom and then found a kind of rebirth. And with that rebirth, through a sort of purification, all these things came to me in a flash, and so I decided to follow a path of solitude – together with people who share moments like the one we’re having today, where we question our lives, our ways of seeing things, and open ourselves to a kind of growth, a kind of thinking together, a sort of welcoming – not just hospitality.

In everything I do, I try to express it through art towards myself, through creativity – beyond what others study – because all of this came to me at a very late age. But having touched bottom, I felt like a child again, like a rebirth, where I feel joy and the strength to fight what’s negative.

And so I transformed that negative moment into creativity, into something positive – into accepting everything that comes with what I see and what I do.

The joy of sharing a meal, an experience, of showing someone a barbecue, a different way of cooking… I see all that as the joy of a day filled with love, with things that make up for a negative past. It’s something I really feel: this transformation of my being – the “me I was” – and the enriched “me of today.”

MMZ: And if someone tells you that you’re an artist – is that something that makes you happy?

GC: I don’t make too much of it. I don’t really believe in these “artistic” labels because art isn’t something you learn at school.

Art is a gift from God – no school can teach you that. Because they’re visions: anything you pick up can become something.

MMZ: Gesuino, would you say that art flows through your everyday life?

GC: Through everything. Even in the blood, even in the pain you feel from a wound, or something that breaks.

For me it’s all an art of living: accepting pain, accepting a bruise, learning to endure it. That too is an art – learning how to speak it, how to name it.

So this art… it’s something expanded. It’s a whole that connects to energy, the energy we can access inside ourselves: asking for forgiveness, saying sorry if I’ve hurt someone, not condemning those who make mistakes. That’s an art too.

Life is all art – it’s all light if you can see it. But not everyone is lucky enough to know that light, the light of the art of life. Because life is all art.

Then again, not everyone has the luck that I’ve had.
You might have the luck of having a father full of money, you go all around Sardinia, you feel happy, you feel happy – but that’s an art you don’t really rejoice in. You’ve studied everything, every part, but the fruit that I can have… not everyone can have it. Because not everyone has the luck to know the art of life.

MMZ: I mean: what is the work you do? How would you call it?

GC: I call it joy, not art.
Because for me it’s a joy – to give expressions that human beings don’t give. Bones have their own nature, yes… but I give them joy.

MMZ: So this idea of joy has to do with giving something meaning?

GC: Yes. Of course, it’s all connected.
The connection I make with the luck I’ve had – what was it? One night I was sleeping, relaxed, happy, without any worries. And at some point my hand – without me moving it – raised itself. I was another man; I wasn’t myself anymore. It wasn’t my will: my hand went like this… I was someone else. These things – they’re miracles.

MMZ: And do you think there’s a message you want to convey with the works you make?

GC: No, there’s no message, because people are polluted, and they don’t receive it.
So I leave it to time. I don’t go around saying: “Gesuino Coinu is this.”
Not because I wouldn’t know how – it could even give me pleasure. But if the world has to see these things one day, the world will say: “This is something by Gesuino.” But Gesuino is inside those masks. You understand?
That’s what I call my joy – maybe one day they’ll see it.

I’m not Michelangelo. I could even be Michelangelo – but who would believe that Gesuino has Michelangelo’s hands?
No one. They’d say: “Gesuino is out of his mind.”