The exhibition borrows its title from an avant-garde film composed of interconnected sequences, directed by Jean Cocteau (1930) as the first part of the Orphic Trilogy, which was followed by Orpheus (1950) and concluded with Testament of Orpheus (1960). The trilogy unites the mythological figures of Narcissus and Orpheus, and the winged Eros emerges from the dark shadow cast by the three celestial bodies in their eclipses. Orpheus blends into a surrealistic reading of the ancient enigmatic myth of the tragic fate of the poet and the youthful rebellious force inherent in the lyrics and sound of a poem. Orpheus is the archetype of the poet, especially of the singing poet. Ovid mystically transforms Orpheus into a poetic metamorphosis, a transformative Orpheus that is the very nature of transformation, man in nature interrogating the nature of transitional phenomena. The poem is something made or crafted. In Greek, creative is poietic – the poet’s creation is as marvelous as nature’s.

To the poet, metamorphosis is a force of desire opposed to the powers that be, a counter-cosmic agency that interferes with the cosmo-poietic dynamics. In other words, the will kindled by the Promethean flame to defy the oracle’s prophecies about the decision of the gods. Orpheus is the source of a new spheropoetic species that has become a biosphero-poietic geoforce. Meta-m-orphosis has two sides, destruction and creation, death and re-birth in a process of eternal return of the ever different, the art of transformation in which the spirit is purified. Meta indicates inner transformation, the temporality of the process rather than immortality, in-between-ness, “the metamorphic process going backward as well as forward” in manifold micro-events.

Metamorphosis is also the transformation process in evolutionary theory and biology. Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis of plants proposes an unexpected perspective onto the botanical investigation of the morphology of organic and living forms, trying to grasp the formative forces of the natural world, not only the evolution of form. The Urpflanze, or primeval plant, is a term from Goethe’s search for the “archetypal plant”. From this ideal conceptual archetype, all plant species arise through modification in continuous metamorphosis, steps of individuation through experience. It is the manifestation of an idea, a non-material concept at the heart of things, a mental power shifting through the gears of the transformative process, but graspable only by intuition and poetic sensibility. The sensual world is a precursor of the physical. The Urpflanze, the dynamic inward archetype of a plant, is not accessible to logical, deductive reasoning. The mysterious architecture of the formative process remains open and unknown. Metamorphosis is also adaptation to the environment, although not in fulfillment of a design plan, a teleology. Its inner impulses are not mere survival instincts. This leads to an understanding of ecology not as a food chain, but as an inner ideal aiming to actualize every living organism on its own. The Urpflanze extends to the Urphänomen that applies to the spectrum of living things. It is the unifying and overarching principle of Goethe’s metamorphosis of plants that unites science and poetry, overcoming subject/object dualism. Being poetic and being scientific are not incompatible. They are complementary.

The title of the exhibition connects metamorphosis back to the organic and living, both material and immaterial. It is not about essentialism, but essences affirming their own difference. Poiesis is the blooming of a blossom, the emergence of a silk moth from its cocoon. Blood cells are created in haemato-poiesis in a technological-biological process. The drops of the blood of a poet have a metaphoric power to become a randomly scattered constellation of stars, a flower blooming in the depth of the soul, a red rose, ephemeral like the vanishing presence of the echo with which the voice and sonic pattern of the lyre resonate with the inhuman sounds of nature. The breath exhibits its debt to the wind. Blood and water are mutually replaceable. Vessels carry rhythm and pattern – a primordial pattern.

Metamorphosis, which translates as transformation or transfiguration, can be broken into Meta, meaning “after”, and morphe, meaning “form”. Morpheus is one of the Greek winged gods, the god of dreams and nightmares who alters and shapes the dreams of the sleeping, son of Hypnos and Pasithea, of sleep and hallucinations. He and his demonic brothers Phobetor and Phantasos display their phantomic deceptive power by mimicking forms and forces of nature. Morphing, the gradual process of turning an image smoothly into another, is well known in an art context. Morphology is the study of form in linguistics, and in biology. Metamorphosis can be understood as the “pure plastic idea,” suggestive of plasticity in cognitive science, the plastic ability of imagination and creativity. Perhaps imagination is more important than knowledge.

In the creative principle of the imagination lies the beginning of all miracles. The magical, cult and ritualistic character of art is the archetype of art that remains unconsciously in our collective mind. It is troubling to teach creativity, at the heart of which is the mysterious, the dark, impenetrable and yet profound depth from which glories come, and no one knows why. What has become of the depth of creativity in the age of digital reasoning?

The mythical poet’s method of paradoxical transformations makes the future world possible for art and artists. How do human or natural creativity and poetic relate to synthetic intelligence and its combinatory creativity? Is AI more-than-human intelligence, a desire to transcend the limits of nature and reach for immortality? Will the pervasive scattered global cognitive automation endlessly gravitate, and yet remain unable to form a harmonious pattern. Will these operations perform a total oracle, and will the poet still have the magic power to escape its prediction? The po-ethic is more than intelligence. It is conscious, imaginative, laughing at itself, deconstructive and yet a rhythmic motif, an aesthetic pattern with its own moods of headaches, humor, and grief. Imagine the infinite metaphors of metamorphosis, and metamorphosis of metaphors. Why not the story of a salesman by the name of Gregor Samsa who “woke one morning from troubled dreams” and “found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect”?

The works in the exhibition contribute different artistic interpretations of metamorphosis.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova and Rocco A. de Filippo