The Post-material archive 03

This installation by Elisa Capucci is part of a collective exhibition featuring four artists under 35, who after winning the first prize of the ”Artefici del Nostro Tempo” 2026 award, are presenting their works at the Venice Pavilion throughout the entire duration of the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys.

The Post-material Archive 03 extends Elisa Capucci’s The Post-material Archive series through an immersive installation that articulates the life phases of a singular hybrid organism. Each anatomical fragment and developmental phase of the creature corresponds to a distinct stage within its life cycle.
Industrial scaffolding pipes construct a fundamental structural system through which the hybrid organism is generated and brought into being, forming an evolving framework where hybrid forms coexist, mutate, and continuously transform. Casting, the central technique underlying the work, operates not merely as a reproductive process, but as a trans-material methodology that connects heterogeneous substances, temporalities, and species. Waste materials, urban residues, and speculative anatomies derived from imagined futures are assembled and transformed into composite hybrid bodies. Matter is understood as an active agent, simultaneously shaping and being shaped through processes of continuous material exchange. This series explores the kinships between living and non-living entities, the interactions between species and productive and socio-economic infrastructures, and the potential configurations of post-human futures.
Capucci’s research approaches sculpture not as a mere formal or aesthetic outcome, but as an active epistemic and pedagogical practice. Drawing on speculative realism and vital materialism, the artist investigates sculpture as a diffractive instrument capable of reconfiguring relationships between humans and the complex materialities and corporalities of the contemporary condition. From this perspective, the sculptural work becomes a site of collective future memory, a device for processing grief, and a space of active transformation.