To think of oneself as an animal.

Text by: Mônica Hoff, curator and coordinator of the Pivô Research Program. 2024

Thinking of oneself as an animal is a recurring exercise in Dariane Martiól's artistic practice. Not because it brings her closer to beings other than humans, but because it puts her in conflict with what makes her human. Her interest in the animalistic is related to how it allows her to inhabit the absurd as an ungraspable feeling between one state and another. It is in the abyss that her work happens; it is in life in excess that her thought takes shape – on the thin line between what touches and what does not fit within Christian morality.

Amoral? Perhaps. Immoral? Never. The artist knows that art, unlike philosophy, a field she knows well, does not seek to improve "man," nor to reach God. Whether in the performances she creates with her mother, or in her studies on the figure of the centaur, research she develops in her residence in Pivô, in both Dariane uses the eroticization of life as a tool that allows her to play with the absurd and, thus, escape the moralizing logic of divine ascension.

If, in the series of works created with her mother, the idea of matricide is the primary conceptual element, then, in terms of language, her death is nothing more than a philosophical-psychoanalytic construction of the death of a certain mother and of a certain idea. By proposing such a performative game with her mother, Dariane kills her, but with pleasure. Like Ocean Vuong, in her long letter to her mother, the artist constructs “a lyrical prose that haunts us”—through its tragic dimension, but mainly through its erotic dimension.

In her research with centaurs, "mythological" figures nonexistent in Greek mythology, a field of extreme interest to the artist, by positioning herself as one, Martiól makes the animalistic not something that establishes the possibility of being other than human, but the possibility of being, above all, human, all too human – even if another human.

Dariane knows that (our) monsters are right, and she works hard to show us that.