Fabula | Ivan Terranova 2023
curated by Gianluca Collica

Public discourse on environmental issues has, for years, focused primarily on addressing the climate and energy crises, while the systemic emergency we are currently facing has received comparatively less attention. This emergency entails a profound disruption of living systems and ecosystems, threatening ecological dynamics, evolutionary potential, human subsistence, and the conditions of life available to future generations. It is also, fundamentally, a crisis in our relationship with other forms of life.
Fabula is a year-long journey through territories once inhabited by the Sicilian wolf (Canis lupus cristaldii), whose last known specimen was killed approximately a century ago. Its disappearance had profound consequences not only for the ecological balance of these ecosystems, but also for the loss of a historical and cultural heritage associated for centuries with an animal regarded as the emblem of a wild world—one characterized, in the human imagination, by strength, cunning, and malevolence.
Mechanical images captured by camera traps—devices traditionally employed by biologists and hunters—were carefully installed by the artist following extensive tracking across the territory. They reveal an “other” world: what remains of a wilderness that has long been subjected to fear, containment, control, and erasure. These “acheiropoietic” images—images produced without direct human intervention—offer a glimpse into a nocturnal dimension that has not yet been entirely domesticated. The very territories that, during the day, become extensions of urban gardens and recreational “habitats” are transformed at night, revealing an unexpected and renewed vitality.
As the French philosopher Baptiste Morizot writes: “We should hope that the diplomat who has gone into the forest among other living beings returns transformed, quietly rewilded, far removed from the imagined ferocity attributed to the Others. That the one who allows himself to be forested by other living beings returns from his lycanthropic journey slightly altered: a hybrid, poised between two worlds. Neither diminished nor purified, simply other, and at least somewhat capable of travelling between worlds and enabling them to communicate, in order to work towards the creation of a common world.”
Ivan Terranova’s video installation projects us into an unexplored geography, inviting us to experience an ancestral temporality: a time when human beings shared their needs and spaces with other forms of life; a time when the boundaries between human and animal, wild and domestic, had not yet become so sharply defined.
The footage was recorded across the entire Sicilian Apennine range, tracing a landscape in which the memory of an extinct species becomes a means of questioning the ways in which we inhabit, perceive, and share the world with other forms of life.