Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries (LAB)

O Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries (LAB) configura-se como um laboratório experimental que promove combinações inovadoras entre arte e etnografia, explorando as potencialidades de um conhecimento que transcenda os limites disciplinares tradicionais. Inspirando-se nas perspetivas das artes, das ciências sociais e das humanidades, o LAB propõe-se como um espaço de convergência e hibridização, onde colaborações interdisciplinares e indisciplinares possam dar origem a novas formas de exploração e representação das múltiplas dimensões do mundo. Estas dimensões – humanas e não-humanas, animadas e inanimadas, materiais e imateriais – podem ser vividas, sentidas e imaginadas, mas raramente encontram expressão adequada através de abordagens exclusivamente textuais ou monodisciplinares.

O LAB não se limita a “ocupar as margens” das disciplinas, mas desafia as próprias linhas de demarcação, transformando os limites em espaços de troca, tensão e inovação. Este esforço não visa alcançar um equilíbrio precário entre antropologia e arte, mas antes tornar visíveis as fraturas epistemológicas, estéticas e políticas que emergem do seu encontro. Explorar as margens significa abrir novos espaços de pesquisa, aventurar-se por caminhos ainda não trilhados e avançar em diálogo constante com um panorama em contínua transformação. Este método dinâmico e processual, enraizado numa visão coletiva e socialmente engajada, promove uma antropologia viva e uma arte crítica, capazes de questionar as convenções e os paradigmas estabelecidos.

O LAB compromete-se a apoiar experimentações que unam emoções, sensorialidade e imaginação com rigor teórico e profundidade metodológica. As colaborações que emergem deste espaço não visam apenas produzir novas formas de conhecimento, mas também criar modalidades de expressão inclusivas, evocativas e transformadoras. Baseando-se na ideia de que a pesquisa não é um ato conclusivo, mas sim um processo aberto e em evolução, o LAB incentiva práticas que vão além da mera representação, abraçando a performatividade, a evocação e a materialidade como componentes essenciais do saber antropológico e artístico.

Convidamos curadores, artistas, antropólogos e investigadores de todas as áreas a contribuir com explorações metodológicas, colaborações transdisciplinares e projetos experimentais que interroguem os limites disciplinares e abracem formas de produção de conhecimento mais dinâmicas e abertas. O LAB posiciona-se como um espaço generativo, onde o diálogo entre arte e antropologia não é apenas uma ferramenta de investigação, mas também uma prática ética e política para imaginar mundos alternativos e enfrentar os desafios do nosso tempo.

Curadoria 2025: Marco Maria Zanin

O LAB inaugura com a curadoria do artista, investigador e ativista italiano Marco Maria Zanin.

Marco Maria Zanin (Pádua, 1983) é um artista, investigador e ativista cujo trabalho explora as interseções entre arte contemporânea, antropologia e envolvimento comunitário.

A pesquisa de Zanin concentra-se nas relações entre seres humanos e território, enfatizando uma abordagem intercultural que valoriza práticas e rituais capazes de fortalecer os laços entre as comunidades e o ambiente. O seu trabalho propõe colocar a vida, em todas as suas formas, no centro da reflexão artística e antropológica, explorando como artefatos, rituais e o artesanato podem fomentar conexões profundas entre comunidades e os seus territórios.

Com formação em Literatura Moderna e Relações Internacionais, Zanin está atualmente a realizar um doutoramento em Antropologia na ISCTE/NOVA University de Lisboa, onde a sua tese, intitulada “Potencialidades na Fronteira entre Arte e Artefato”, investiga os limites e as interseções entre práticas artísticas e objetos culturais.

As suas obras fazem parte de prestigiadas coleções públicas e privadas, incluindo MART (Rovereto), Museu Morandi, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Fondazione Brodbeck, Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo, MAM Rio de Janeiro e Salsali Museum no Dubai.

Em 2015, Zanin fundou o Humus Interdisciplinary, uma plataforma dedicada à criação de residências artísticas que conectam artistas com comunidades rurais na região do Vêneto. O Humus foca-se na reinterpretação de identidades locais através de colaborações artísticas e iniciativas de revitalização cultural. Integrando arte contemporânea em contextos rurais marginalizados, Zanin promove o desenvolvimento comunitário e uma maior consciência da relação complexa entre vida humana e território.

Através da sua prática artística e da sua pesquisa, Zanin destaca a importância de criar novos paradigmas relacionais que superem as distâncias entre arte, artesanato e tradições comunitárias. Estes pontos de interseção são utilizados para promover a cura sociocultural e a reconexão diante da fragmentação moderna.

Conectando arte contemporânea, antropologia e o papel dos museus etnográficos, o trabalho de Zanin reflete sobre a utilização da arte como ferramenta transformativa para reanimar objetos históricos e criar diálogos interculturais. Situando-se entre diversas disciplinas e assumindo diferentes papéis, Zanin repensa o museu etnográfico como um espaço dinâmico onde arte, artesanato e conexões interculturais convergem para promover uma nova compreensão do património e enfrentar questões sociais mais amplas relacionadas com identidade, pertença e restituição cultural.

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.”