“He was a being formed in the ‘very poetry of nature.” Homo faber is the subject–agent who has always possessed tools and has always been able to make them, to produce new tools for specific ends—first and foremost to persist, or better, to survive. There is an element that must necessarily be added to this outline of the archetypal fabricans, which is the ability to construct knowledge and accretionary skills that can be handed down. Homo faber is the person who plans, produces, and uses a determinate tool, but also the person who, in this sort of fabricative web, structurally combines knowledge and skills so as to construct the bases for new material fabrication: -a substratum of progressive relational depth between the human being and the so-called product/tool; -an apparently intangible fabrication that will constitute the nucleus for other, very different future fabrications and applications that are tangible. Homo faber is, without interruption, the tireless builder of a parallel world to the world that is apparently given.
Diego Scroppo, born in Turin in 1981, graduated at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in 2005. He has taken part in the curatorial programme run by Unidee Città dell’arte, Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella and in an artistic project in collaboration with the LeFresnoy Institute of Lille, and is currently at the Fondazione Spinola Banna for the arts. He has held two solo exhibitions at the Guido Costa Projects Gallery, other two on his “ghost space”, and has participated in various international collective shows.
