SOMA

“NOW, YOU SWALLOW TWO OR THREE HALF-GRAMME TABLETS, AND THERE YOU ARE. ANYBODY CAN BE VIRTUOUS NOW. YOU CAN CARRY AT LEAST HALF YOUR MORALITY ABOUT IN A BOTTLE. CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT TEARS—THAT’S WHAT SOMA IS.”

BRAVE NEW WORLD, ALDOUS HUXLEY

Soma is a series of works of art by Lanfranco Aceti which focus on the use of the human body and the contradictions and failures of contemporary social politics in Europe. It was first exhibited at Supermarket 2015 in Stockholm. Soma consists of an installation, textile works of art, a series of drawings, texts (oil paint on canvas), and a performance.

The works of art are directly inspired by the socio-political conflicts in Turkey and by the tensions within the EU and with its international partners. The performance, part of this series and titled The Slap, will provide the public with the ‘opportunity’ to slap, for a fee of 500 euro, a ‘worker, protester, a muslim, and a migrant’ who will be standing on a ‘preaching’ box (also known as soap box).

In these works of art Aceti blends contemporary events, ignored or willfully forgotten historical inheritances, and patriarchal exploitation of women’s labour. Aceti looks at reality with the impetus of anger and with no piety in re-discovering and pointing to the abuse, the injustices, and the exploitation. Patriarchalism emerges from the mine within which and from which all abuses re-emerge. The artist inspired by specific episodes — e.g. the explosion in the mine of Soma in Turkey on May 13, 2014 — moves from the specifics of the event to grasp universal commonality across time and space of exploitation, labour as enslavement, and patriarchal destructions.

“What you need is a gramme of soma,” Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932. Inspired from this phrase in Brave New World the works of art explore the relationship between the individual’s body and the need of the State and corporations to control the last impenetrable fortresses: the individual body and the mind where still reside matriarchal spiritual traditions.

Lies at the Root is a fabric installation featuring oil paint text, meticulously hand-painted by the artist onto raw silk fabric that mimics the appearance of jute. This artwork, a pivotal component of the broader project titled Soma, emerged as a political critique of contemporary ahistorical approaches to social dilemmas, conflicts, and societal upheaval. Aceti’s artistic creation serves as a scathing commentary on the prevailing, superficial, and decontextualized strategies for ‘political problem-solving.’ These approaches, rather than addressing underlying issues, often perpetuate novel and increasingly intricate, if not more insidious, forms of dominance and imperialism.

The artist employs contemporary events as a lens to scrutinize the overarching consequences of ideologically entrenched behaviors that subvert reason in favor of advancing financial and power-driven agendas. These agendas, driven less by the pursuit of truth and more by a quest for power and dominion, form the focal point of Aceti’s critical examination which places the viewer at the center of these games of patriarchal power and exploitation.

Similarly to Huxley’s world of numbness and detachment, contemporary times are characterized by and increased tuning out or detachment from the complicated politics of exploitation and abuse. The corporate imperialism manifest itself in the fabrication and manipulation of dissent in order to exercise even deeper forms of control.

The works of art are a reflection of the current sociopolitical crises in Northern and in Southern Europe and create an experience of the unresolved contradictions and hypocrisies that characterize imperialistic contemporary politics and capitalistic frameworks of exploitation which departing from an AngloSaxon vision of the world discards all others views and perspectives as barbarians, undemocratic, if not outrightly autocratic.

In its quest to assert control eroded democratic Western societies impose colonial discourses of decolonialization of nations around the world which they have colonized or discourses of gender and engendered societies upon the individual and the societies upon which they have imposed fascistic frameworks of patriarchalism.

For the artist more than the body and the mind already under assault since the 1970s what is now at risk of being destroyed are the last anthropological archeological inheritances of matriarchal behaviors the in themselves has become the last tool to assert independence from increased levels of surveillance and control within contemporary capitalistic, imperialistic, and authoritarian frameworks, that even in the 21st century, continue to present workers, protesters, migrants and women — with their vociferous dissent — both as diseased and disease.

The artist would like thank Batu Bozoglu for his work as performance artist for The Slap.

References:

[1] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Flamingo, 1994), 217.

Image Captions:

Lanfranco Aceti, Lies at the Root, 2014. Raw silk fabric and oil paint. Dimensions: each sheet 45 cm. x 70 cm. Total dimensions: 210 cm. x 230 cm.

Lanfranco Aceti, Untitled, 2021. Photographic print. Dimensions: 100 cm. X 67 cm.