FERAL KINDNESS
“Good manners” are learned before we even know what they are. Long before we can name a rule, we have already learned to correct ourselves and prepare our bodies to become socially legible.
Feral Kindness, an exhibition by Galamb Thorday and Claudia Petraroli curated by Giorgia Aprosio, reconstructs in reverse the process through which we learn to be seen: from the surface of social behaviour to the inner voice that continues to guide our actions, even when no one is watching.
The title brings together two apparently irreconcilable words.“Feral” refers to something wild, animal or savage. In English, it is also used to describe animals that were once domesticated and have since returned to a wild state.
“Kindness,” by contrast, means gentleness and care, but also the reassuring form taken by a body trained to appear agreeable.
Their combination produces the oxymoron from which the exhibition proceeds: how much instinct survives in the gestures we have learned, and how much discipline is concealed in the forms through which we make ourselves acceptable?
What emerges is a portrait of care as a form of labour in its own right: repetitive, unpaid practices that require the constant disciplining, correcting and transforming of the body so that it conforms to social codes of desirability and decorum. It is in the gap between the reassuring promise and the effort of everyday performance that the grotesque, almost uncanny dimension running through the works’ accommodating and playful appearance begins to emerge.
The exhibition begins with the public dimension of a femininity constructed and performed according to social gender norms. It then moves through the private rituals of beauty and care that prepare bodies to enter the scene, before arriving at the internalised surveillance through which each subject learns to constantly control and modify herself.