/ PRESENTATION

Human Theater, Theater of Nature

Biancoshock / Francesco Garbelli / Dott. PorkA’s

Extract from an essay by Francesco Ciaponi

There is a question that underground culture has never ceased to ask: how can an image be wrested from its intended function? How can a sign be compelled to tell a story contrary to the one for which it was designed?
The Situationist answer had a precise name: détournement — not parody, not mere irony, but diversion, hijacking, rerouting. Teatro Umano, Teatro della Natura positions itself precisely within this zone of tension.
The works brought together here — sculptures and urban installations by Biancoshock and Francesco Garbelli, alongside photographs by the collective Dott. PorkA’s — share neither a common style nor a unified iconography. The works brought together here — sculptures and urban installations by Biancoshock and Francesco Garbelli, alongside photographs by the collective Dott. PorkA’s — share neither a common style nor a unified iconography.
What they do share is a method: the extraction of a fragment of already codified language from everyday reality — the corporate sign, the street plaque, the sacred image, ornamental greenery — and its return in a form that renders visible the latent ideological content concealed within it.
Garbelli and Biancoshock operate along one of the most ideologically charged frontiers of the contemporary city: public greenery. Gardens, flowerbeds, and roundabouts are not nature; they are its scenographic representation, its domesticated simulacrum.
Their “Apocalypse Trilogy” stages a series of paradoxes whose economy is itself part of the critical gesture: obese flowers nourished by a multinational fast-food corporation; flowers confined within rusted cages under the patronage of an imaginary holding company; flowers labelled with Latin nomenclature like specimens in a scientific catalogue that is simultaneously a report from the catastrophe in which we are immersed.
This is greenwashing carried to its most paradoxical conclusion, the moment when the institutional form reveals itself as a mask of power.
The Human Theatre, by contrast, belongs to Dott. PorkA’s, who have developed a practice without real equivalent in the Italian artistic landscape: street-photo performance. Photography does not document the action; it constitutes it.

Their series “Jesus Was Not a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” approaches the figure of Christ not as a religious subject but as a field of cultural forces. A Christ who leaves Rome with a wheeled suitcase on the day of a papal election; who breaks bread in a kebab shop; who has a dollar sign tattooed on his chest, this Christ does not mock the Christian tradition.
Rather, he re-enacts its original radicality, a radicality systematically neutralised by ecclesiastical institutions.
The PorkA’s invert the Duchampian gesture: they bring the gallery — its gaze, its symbolic apparatus — into places that the gallery would never ordinarily name, because the truths they contain would be unbearable.
Two structural elements unite all three artistic practices: the use of chance and the centrality of play. To work in spaces one does not own is to relinquish the illusion of controlling every detail.
The unforeseen is not avoided; it is welcomed as part of the language itself.And play — understood not as escapism but as an epistemological foundation — becomes the instrument through which one can take seriously everything that the dominant system has rendered invisible, natural, unquestionable.

That these works should enter the gallery is not a contradiction; it is the very condition anticipated by Walter Benjamin. Once an artwork loses the aura of its original context, it does not disappear; it changes function. It becomes a document, a trace of a situation that occurred elsewhere. The gallery does not neutralise it; it slows it down.
Here, the gaze can finally linger, free to read the signs, to appropriate the mechanism of détournement, to engage with everything that the delirious haste of the city ordinarily renders impossible. Space belongs to those willing to transform it, even temporarily, even illegally, even in the knowledge that someone will eventually restore it to order. Meaning belongs to those with the courage to render it unstable. Garbelli and Biancoshock’s obese flowers grow within that fissure. The Christ of the PorkA’s walks through it.

• download essai (pdf - EN)