Carapace. Testimonianza di un’estinzione

Carapace. Testimony of extinction. By Federica Dal Falco 2015/2024 3d printing sculpture, 57 x 36 x 32 cm kitchen table 104 x 63 x 65.5 cm, plexiglass case lightbox 50 x 80 x 12 cm Curator Duccio Trombadori Carlo Severati’s Embrice Gallery Via delle Sette Chiese 78 (Rome) 21-26 October 2024 Carapace is a digital reconstruction of the case of the giant tortoise Cylindraspis vosmaeri, extinct at the end of the 18th century. The species was endemic to Rodrigues, a small island of 103 km2 located 348 miles east of Madagascar, in the Mascarene archipelago. Since the beginning of the 18th century, the natural history of the place has been known thanks to the memoirs of the Huguenot shipwreck survivor François Leguat. In the Anthropocene era, Carapace is a sign of the fragility of life, of disappearance and predation and restores visibility, through a temporal inversion, to the ecological modifications brought about by humans. From oblivion, the sculpture transfers the missing animal into a metaphorical form of the incarnation of an interiority, questioning individual and collective memories and the influences between science, literature, the arts and new technologies. Inside the Embrice Gallery, the installation is located in a small space covered in wooden slats, with the aim of suggesting the environment of the tortoise boats, the vessels used to deport turtles to nearby islands. The extermination for commercial purposes continued for decades, also justified by the mistaken belief that the meat of the turtles was an antidote to the scurvy contracted by sailors. The translucent resin carapace is preserved in a plexiglass case mounted on a kitchen table, a domestic object with prosaic and at the same time disturbing meanings. The space is illuminated by two lightboxes, whose digital images simulate the sunrise and sunset of a timeless day in a hypothetical Rodrigues. In the layered images, sections of the coast and the seabed emerge, where a sort of primordial algae appear, the result of the transformation of the map of the island. The landscapes are created by superimposing and transforming elements taken from Leguat’s illustrations and fragments of natural and artificial virtual patterns with a sensitive research on the theme of atmospheres.