Esausta (Voices Voices)

The Etruscan rite of haruspicy consisted in reading the entrails of animals, usually sheep, by extracting the intestines and liver to create a bodily bond with the world of the afterlife. Esausta (Voices Voices) awakens collective memories in which death is condemnation and repression, but also a silent entity that goes on inhabiting spaces. Esausta (“exhausted”) stands for a deathly body that breathes, consumed by pain, empty like the tubes from which the gaseous spectre of fennel essence seeps out and spreads through the whole space. The memory of the dead is experienced through smell, an invisible medium able to activate and recall traumatic events. In Michela Zucca’s text Donne delinquenti, the word “finocchio” (fennel) – used today improperly, as a slur mocking sexual orientation – is traced back to the hanging of women considered witches, while the bodies of homosexual men were used to burn the condemned women.
After the hanging, the bodies were sprinkled with fennel seeds to remove the smell of putrefaction and burning. The work presents itself as an intestinal, robotic creature whose materials absorb the diffused essence, creating a collective ritual moment of remembrance for bodies, identities and species that no longer exist but go on haunting and living in their bodily absence.