Persona

“Persona” is a visual essay based on the fifth chapter of the book “Love’s Body” written in 1966 by the American scholar, writer and social philosopher Norman O. Brown.
Through the use of quotes, aphorisms, poetry and free associations, “Love’s Body” paints a portrait of the divinely inspired schizophrenic who transforms the world by poetic imagination and by his refusal to accept the boundaries that define the normal sense of reality.
By juxtaposing excerpts from “Love’s Body” chapter V with images found online and subsequently reassembled by the author, “Persona” projects the vision and research of Brown in the current times exposing the multifarious nature of personal identity in relation to the digital era.
At the centre of the Persona universe lies the multiple and collective nature of what we call “the individual”, in the words of the philosopher Rosi Braidotti: “a transversal entity, a moveable assemblage within a common life-space that the subject never masters nor possesses but merely inhabits, crosses, always in a community, a pack, a group or a cluster.”
The publication, sold in a plastic shipping bag that must be torn in order to access it, works also as a modulable exhibition display.