Francesco Papetti

I’m interested in the refashioning of matter and materials. It’s one of humanity’s oldest habits: turning graphite into a drawing, wood into a sculpture. A process of translation in which meaning is lost and interpretation remains, perhaps the opposite of what language aspires to do.

Much like graphite or wood, subjects become objects when captured by a digital scan. Experiences, personalities, flavors, sounds, and moments in time are reduced to objects: fossils of what once was, carrying traces of their former meaning, stripped of the context in which they existed.

But what is an object without context?

Unable to resist comprehension, we fill gaps in knowledge with pieces of ourselves. We are, by nature, resistant to entropy.

In this obsessive search for truth, I find myself compelled to point in the wrong direction. I want to produce bad evidence.

— Francesco Papetti