Aruspicina Futura
Davide Marcianesi is an interdisciplinary designer and artist based in Milan. He holds both a BA in Product Design and a MSc in Product-Service System Design from his studies at Politecnico di Milano. Since 2020 he’s been focusing on both artistic and scientific research, speculative design and temporary installations, with projects that explore future and alternative scenarios for the (more-than) human society.
His practice, most recently, has been revolving around the exploration of death - both from a cultural and political point of view - with a research project titled 'Aruspicina Futura', which aims to expose and narrate ghostly paradigms of death and violence towards bodies and corpses, along with the implications such patterns have on the lives of human- and other-than-human kinds.
On the occasion of the first Postnatural Independent Program, he had the chance to exhibit his work at Matadero (Madrid, 2023) for the collective show 'we?', curated by the Institute For Postnatural Studies. In 2021 he developed a visual manifesto for the program “Like Life. Design Multispecie” curated by Mali Weil and hosted by MUSE - Museo delle Scienze di Trento.
Recent contributions were featured in the publications ‘La Condición Postnatural: Glosario de Ecologías para Otros Mundos’ and ‘We?’, both published by Cthulhu Books (Madrid, 2023-24).
Aruspicina is the art of reading the entrails of dead animals as a divinatory practice to understand the future. This gruesome process was a performative ritual developed by the Etruscans, a population that lived in Italy between the 9th and the 1st Century B.C., who believed that due to the close relationship between the macro- and the microcosm, the distribution of the celestial vault – which regulated their political system – was also reflected on the Earth’s individual elements, both living and non-living.
In this context, Aruspicina Futura works as an interdisciplinary, interspecies research that dissects and scrutinizes dead ecologies in order to foresee our shared future on planet Earth. In doing so, the researcher becomes the haruspex itself who unveils histories of extractive abuse perpetrated by humans upon other organisms, and enables new speculative narratives to reconcile our existence with a “tentacular” necropolitical ecosystem.
The project started by exploring ways in which a decayed human body (corpse) could be a resource too, studying existing (or existed) necropolitical artifacts, processes and infrastructures and their effects on the environment. Shifting the focus towards other species, in 2023 it became a lens to investigate the spatial and political history of an ex-slaughterhouse — Madrid's Matadero — revealing buried violence related to animal abuse still roaming across its spaces.
My future plans for the project would be to open its borders and make it a collaborative framework with which to gather external knowledges, researches and case studies in order to build a cross-disciplinary collaborative archive about this (necro...)matter.