Who are we, and what makes us what we are?

‘Just like in the outside world, our self is a construction of our brain; the self is the result of the construction of our relations with other selves and the environment. Understanding how the sense of identity emerges, develops and expresses itself through our lives is essential to our comprehension of what kind of being we are.

Identity develops incessantly through life. The choices we make when wearing something, colouring our hair and undertaking cosmetic surgery are a way of searching for and expressing our identity. This is something that dates back to the homo sapiens sapiens and his collection of bijoux buried in the grave with him, it is something that adolescents go through every time they mark their own body with piercings and tattoos, while fighting for their mature identity.’

As Francis Bacon says about one of his paintings: “is the struggle to achieve a separate and secure identity, we have to learn to distinguish between our own bodies and those of others, to work out that our bodies not only have weight and mass, but also boundaries, limits, perimeters. The figures in this triptych are seen as embryonic shapes desperately trying – and failing- to form a single, secure identity, they speak of a universal human condition, the aboriginal calamity with which we struggle all our lives – and this is the stuff of the greatest art”.

In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, Edinburgh.

www.iicedimburgo.esteri.it