Antonio Caronia, Il corpo virtuale, 2022

Over tens of thousands of years, our bodies have not undergone any biological changes. Homo sapiens has woven a history made up of symbolic processes, cultures and representations, always inhabiting the same body that has marked the boundary between the inside and the outside. In the post-human era, however, the body seems to have dematerialised, disseminated. It is the Kafkaesque insect, Dick’s android, Ballarde Haraway’s cyborg. Yet it continues to be the arm that moves the artist’s brush, the eye that looks at the white paper, the hand that types the letters on the keyboard. The body is still revolutionary.

With the entry of the Metaverse and NFT fashion on the scene, Antonio Caronia’s The Virtual Body today becomes a prophetic reading. But it is also a guide to looking at the present through the lens of a future past, a glimpse into the imaginary, between what we have been and what we could become, as a society and as bodies.