Speculative Evolution in the Post-Anthropocene

Finally, Giusy Amoroso’s *Specimen Study: Dionaea vertebralis* (from the *Forme Evolutae* project) marks the absolute theoretical culmination of the exhibition. Inspired by the massive, post-industrial contamination of the Terra dei Fuochi region in southern Italy, the media artist explores and examines how life adapts to highly toxic pollution and hostile ecosystems. Amoroso conceives of survival not as nostalgic resistance, but rather as the strategic incorporation of pollutants and toxins into living tissue—survival as creative transformation through contamination and adaptation in the Post-Anthropocene.

Her installation imagines how organisms integrate metals and synthetic polymers directly into their skeletal structures and circulatory systems, thereby generating bizarre, novel forms. In this speculative process of form-making, paradoxically, it is precisely waste and toxins that become fundamental metabolic components for the further evolution of life on this planet.