Dentro l’oltre

 Voirhumain curated by Chiara di Blasi

Mish Mash Festival 2025 / Cisterna del Duomo Antico

Giada Ilacqua, known by her artistic name Voirhumain, began her career as a video-maker, a medium entirely absent from the exhibition. Voirhumain’s work is nothing more than the product of contemporary artists’ inevitable confrontation with the relentless advance of artificial intelligence.
Faced with the choice made by many creatives to fight, stamp their feet and rebel against the spread of AI, Voirhumain has chosen the opposite path: after years of study, she realises that AI can do in a few minutes what takes her days, and she accepts it. Crushed and crumpled, she takes refuge in a sanctuary inaccessible to artificial intelligence: the scribble, here a symbol of rebellion against mechanical precision. The scribble is, by its very nature, irreproducible by AI; it can be recreated in form but not in process; the total randomness that characterises it is inaccessible to an algorithm-based tool which, despite infinite variables, is governed by defined rules. So, whilst the scribble begins as a form of mockery directed at AI, a tantrum from an angry child,  it transforms into a subversive force, nourished and imbued with the pride of an artist who has managed to escape AI’s grip and refuse to succumb to it.
Another distinctive trait of humanity is empathy: in the artist’s drawings, the lines of the scribble become people, humanised through a profound regression that races backwards, surpassing the artist’s own childhood to place itself centuries earlier and draw upon a traditional artistic trope linked to pareidolia, the optical phenomenon later elevated to a modus operandi, which leads to identifying human profiles in stains, a product of the innate search for the other that characterises humanity.
In Voirhumain’s works, this is translated not into the identification of a profile’s features, but into that of a personality; works that take the form of psychological portraits, in which anatomical elements constitute the coordinates.
The ability to see the human where there is none is a process that is both analogous to and the opposite of that of AI: artificial intelligence mimics the human trace, whilst Voirhumain reclaims it by materialising it, a call for attention from the artist to those behind the line: “listen to me, listen to us.”
In these works of man, apart from his emotions, rendered as abstract forms, only taste, smell, hearing and sight remain, the senses as the final outpost, the last stronghold of the creator.
The exhibition brings together the artist’s highly personal journey and the arcane world of the Tarot. Upon crossing the threshold, veiled by the 13th card of the deck, Death – often associated in fortune-telling with a phase of profound change in the seeker, a symbol of the transition from the material to the spiritual realm – the viewer has the opportunity to delve into the heart of the exhibition, invited into the artist’s work through the deck of Major Arcana she has created, appreciating both its aesthetic and artistic qualities and its esoteric and spiritual dimensions. The deck is placed on the carpet and surrounded by cushions that form part of the artist’s textile work, which also includes interactive pieces such as the one on display in the room.