Giuliana Prucca, Devenir minéral, 2023

Echoing Jean Dubuffet’s idea that thought must arise from matter in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in 20th-century art history using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She uses the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the disappearance of the body. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject are objectified in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, which ultimately leaves nothing but an image.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext, but an active and explosive catapult that challenges the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge’s example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting with the material of Artaud, the most undisciplined of the poet-thinkers of the modern era. The result is a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The choice of writing materials, stone paper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent and intended to give the impression of being covered in dust.