Ivana Adaime Makac, work in progress.

Work in progress features an artist’s studio work, ongoing experimentations, and/or, precisely, works in progress.

Ivana Adaime Makac’s Rééducation is an ongoing project that started in 2009. Rééducation  is a sort of utopian piece in which the artist intends to revert  the domestication of silk worms. Adaime Makac gives the worms the possibility to feed from the mulberry leaves she disposes around them, or instead, to climb the tree or built structure, like in this studio version, and look for their food for themselves.

In a second stage, the artist “proposes” to the worms different structures to locate their cocoons to then mutate to butterflies. As the silk worm has been a domesticated animal for more than 5000, the butterflies cannot fly anymore. One of the utopian outcomes of the piece would be to make the butterflies “remember” how to fly again. The piece’s paradoxical aspect is twofold: firstly, that the artist needs to “assist” the silk worms in order to de-domesticate them; secondly, the time she has fulfil this task, namely, the average time of a human’s life, is immensely short when compared with the 5000 years the domestication took.

The project is repeated every year in the spring, sometimes it takes place in the context of an exhibition, and sometimes in the artist’s studio, like this year.

All images by the artist.