Improving Darwin

Three bodies are exhibited. The first one is upright while the audience invests it with post-its. The second one is continuously washed and the third one is naked waiting for someone to dress it properly. Two “social workers” are ready for work. In the first case, the body exposes the primitive act, the sexual, instinctual, and survivalist drives, and desires of the human being suppressed by the social conformity to which the body is subjected. In the second case, these desires and thoughts are “washed away” to allow a new purified body to be born. In the third case, the reclaimed body is invested with the “right clothes” and “expectations” brought by social workers. Improving Darwin is a performance based on Lacan’s idea of the ego as a subject, formed within a pre-existing symbolic order. This symbolic order is identified by Lacan as a synchronic system of signs and social codes that locates us, shapes us, and transforms us into subjects who act. By creating three different stages of actions, the artists tried to give a visual dimension to this process of ego formation.