The Depth of the Surface: Giuseppe Penone’s To Unroll One’s Skin

In the essay, I expand on the paper I presented during the 2018 Graduate Symposium at The Warehouse of The Rachofsky Collection in Dallas, TX. Focusing on the version of Giuseppe Penone's work "Svolgere la propria pelle" ["To Unroll One's Skin"] of 1970, I investigated the implications of the artist's distinctive sense of contact and touching as a specific attribute of sculpture. Resorting to major sources in film, visual and ecological studies and theory, I argue that the piece should be considered as an outstanding example of the process of "remediation", which was typical of the new avant-garde at that time. More specifically, I contend that Penone's remediation entails a broader understanding of the haptic connections bridging human beings and the surrounding environment, thus allowing an ecological interpretation of media. In this respect, the work of Penone resonates with the search around bodily features and hapticity which characterized the work of fellow artists at that time, both in the United States (i.e. Bruce Nauman) and Japan (Koji Enokura).