ARTICOLI / 4 / Giovanni Aloi /
This essay addresses the growing importance of materiality in relation to posthumanist discourses in contemporary art. It traces a genealogy of materiality in the histories of classical, modern, and contemporary art to explain how the recent philosophical waves of Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism have substantially shifted attention to the new materialist conception of matter as recalcitrant: a subversion of the traditional definitions of agency, resistance, and power in art. From this perspective, materiality becomes a provocative ontological problematizer, mapping a dimension of undeniable bio-traces that relentlessly gesture towards new and urgent registers of ethical realism. It is in this sense, that art with a posthumanist focus considers the corporeality and the place of embodied humans and animals within a material world defined by interconnectedness of bio- and eco-spheres.
