In Oltre Terra, Formafantasma turns wool into a critical lens –
probing the intimate, fraught entanglements between humans,
animals, and materials in a world shaped by extraction, care, and
cohabitation.
At the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where Oltre Terra is on view until July 13, Formafantasma doesn’t simply exhibit wool – they unravel it. They unpick its fibers, tease out its knotted histories, and spin a new conceptual thread – one that binds matter to meaning, texture to ethics, and species to species. This is not merely an exhibition about wool, nor even a meditation on materiality. It is an epistemological provocation: what does it mean to live, to design, and to desire in a world of entangled dependencies? And more urgently – how can we reimagine those dependencies without defaulting to anthropocentric hierarchies?
CROSSING GROUNDS: TRANSHUMANCE AS METHOD
The title Oltre Terra is a precise provocation. Rooted in the Latin trans-humus – across the earth – it evokes not only the seasonal migrations of transhumance but a conceptual crossing of disciplinary, ontological, and temporal terrains. This exhibition is, in essence, a philosophical transhumance. Visitors traverse not just rooms but modes of knowledge: from sheep farming to legal theory, from historical ecology to contemporary aesthetics.
At the core of this work lies a reversal of gaze. Wool has long been seen as a passive material – harvested, processed, worn. But in Oltre Terra, wool becomes an active interlocutor, a witness to human histories and ecological futures. Through the detailed staging of life-size dioramas – echoing but subverting the didactic structures of natural history museums –
Formafantasma interrogates the very tools by which we have come to know and categorize
the world. The sheep is no longer a specimen, but a collaborator in a shared biosocial drama.
DOMESTICATION AS CO-AUTHORSHIP AND TACTILITY AS POLITICS
This co-dramatization is especially palpable in Tactile Afferents, the video work by Joanna Piotrowska and Formafantasma. The film resists the cool distance of documentary. Instead,
it moves close – viscerally, haptically – into the space of touch. Through slow, lingering shots, it evokes the ambiguous intimacy of interspecies contact. Touch is shown as both care and control, affection and aggression. What emerges is a portrait of domestication not as mastery, but as mutual vulnerability. We touch, and are touched. We tame, and are transformed.
It’s here that the exhibition’s most radical proposition emerges: that the relationship between humans and animals is not simply extractive, but constitutive. Domestication is not a one-way operation. Sheep have shaped human settlement patterns, economies, and even sensibilities. What would it mean to take that seriously – not as metaphor, but as infrastructure?
BEYOND MATERIAL: A POETICS OF COEXISTENCE
The exhibition does not offer easy reconciliations. There is no nostalgic return to some prelapsarian state of ecological harmony. Instead, Oltre Terra insists on complexity. Take the recycled wool bales from Manteco or the cc-tapis carpet woven from “rustic” Italian sheep breeds – materials often dismissed as coarse or low-grade. Here, they are elevated not as objects of aesthetic refinement, but as tokens of ethical reconsideration. These are the byproducts of a global system, and yet they contain within them the seeds of another possible economy – one that values resilience over refinement, and entanglement over purity.
Emanuele Coccia’s interpretive texts play a crucial role in thickening this conceptual weave.
His captions don’t explain; they speculate. They render the exhibition not as a linear narrative, but as a constellation of relations – a semantic ecosystem in which language, like wool, is both material and metaphor. Coccia’s presence reminds us that philosophy, too, must leave the ivory tower and enter the barn.
A WORK OF “DE-DOMESTICATION”
What makes Oltre Terra so urgent is its refusal of moral absolutes. Instead of condemning or celebrating domestication, it asks us to dwell within its ambiguities. It neither idealizes the pre-industrial past nor blindly embraces techno-ecological futures. Rather, it demands that we confront the costs – material, ethical, affective – of the worlds we have built and continue to maintain.
Wool, in this context, becomes more than a medium. It is an index of relational ethics – a soft yet stubborn reminder that every act of creation is also an act of entanglement. To go oltre terra is to move not above or beyond the earth, but deeper into its messy, multispecies folds. Formafantasma shows us how.
In the end, Oltre Terra is a work of de-domestication. It loosens the neat categories – human/animal, nature/culture, raw/processed – that structure our modernity. It invites us to feel our way, quite literally, through the tangled skein of co existence. And in doing so, it asks a profound question: What would design look like if we began not with function, form, or market, but with care?
LINK
- Between dust and algorithms. A day with Damiano Tata in his studio - October 24, 2025
- Giuliana Cunéaz: art as an exploration between science and wonder - September 12, 2025
- Beyond the screen: immersion, embodiment, and empathy at Venice Immersive - August 29, 2025
