L’UTOPIA DEL CORPO

In Utopia del corpo (The Utopia of the Body), the figure is not conceived as a finished organism but as a material event. Michel Foucault’s concept of the “utopian body” does not imply perfection, but instability: the body is both the most concrete site of experience and the first territory of imagination, representation, and symbolic construction. It is a place we inhabit yet constantly reinterpret, project, and reconstruct.

Papier-mâché gives this ambivalence a physical form. Emerging from indistinct pulp, the material consolidates and becomes recognizable, much like the body itself. The sculpture’s surface often evokes geological layers, as if organism and sediment coexist. Time, pressure, and repeated gestures accumulate in the work, suggesting that a body is shaped not only spatially but temporally and materially.

Here, the body is not carved but gathered, compacted, and slowly stabilized. Sculpture moves beyond representation, enacting the very conditions under which a body becomes perceptible. Openings and cavities indicate structural incompleteness rather than wounds, emphasizing that a body is never fully closed or self-contained. Its existence relies on systems of recognition, projection, and naming; corporeal unity is not given, but achieved.

The material’s fragility and porous density reinforce this idea: persistence arises not from immutability, but from continuous reassembly — biologically, perceptually, and symbolically. The viewer encounters a form that hovers between emergence and erosion, always slightly ahead of its disappearance and slightly behind its formation.

The work does not present an ideal body but the threshold where matter becomes legible as body. Utopia exists in the gap between what the body is and what we perceive it to be, between substance and recognition. The sculpture stages a reciprocal process: we define the body, yet the body simultaneously defines our sense of identity, scale, vulnerability, and spatial relationship. What stands before us is not a stable figure, but an ongoing negotiation through which matter, perception, and language briefly agree to call something “a body.”