Giovanna Petrocchi



Sculptural Entities, 2020

Sculptural Entities aims to investigate the relationship between organic and artificial forms but at the same time between the ancient and the contemporary realms. It also comes as a result of my interest in examining how knowledge and cultural heritage are produced, organized and consequently authenticated. As a personal desire to access and reconnect to the past whilst giving the possibility to the viewer to explore historical narratives in an alternative way. In this case, by inspiring critical thinking via visual stimuli rather than through systematic dissemination of scientific data.

In the series, I collect digital imagery of mammoth’s findings and mix it with scanned cut-outs of stylized dinosaurs’ 3d puzzles made of cardboard. Both the elements are digitally cropped, hence removed from their original context, and reorganized by myself under a fictional museum-like catalogue. The organic element is therefore communicating with a man-made representation of a natural entity. In comparing the two virtual objects, I aim to stress not only their dissimilarities but also their common features. The pairing might at first seem conflicting, but on a closer look, it seems as if the artificial object is mimicking the movement of its companion on the left side.

The small orange symbols at the bottom right of each composition identify the page's numbers of this fictional cataloguing and are, in fact, petroglyphs cut-outs from imagery of prehistoric rocks found on the internet. Ultimately, the tension between organic and stylized forms, the natural and the man-made, is levelled out both by the use of black and white and the ambiguous background, a virtual stage for the two suspended entities.



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