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 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.