Nanoart | The first scars on silicon

Tracing the origins of the Anthropoperiphery: Nanoart and the foundational gesture on matter.

Beyond the pillars of Hercules (2006)

It took me twenty years to understand what I was doing.

When I entered the cleanrooms of the Politecnico di Torino in 2006, I didn’t have a name for my research program. I didn't have a "manifesto." I only had a recurring, stubborn annoyance with the human being's pretension of being the center of everything—especially of perception. At the time, it felt like an isolated attempt to challenge the "optical dictatorship" of the eye.

Only today, looking back at the entire trajectory, can I see that moment for what it truly was: the foundational gesture of the Anthropoperiphery. That first "verification device" was titled Beyond the pillars of Hercules.

Beyond the pillars of Hercules (2006) | Detail

This first work of Nanoart consists of fifty-four human footprints engraved on a silicon wafer through photolithography—the same process used to manufacture the semiconductors that power our digital world. Spanning a "walk" of approximately 28 millimeters, these are not digital illustrations; they are physical sculptures. We carved them into matter, even reproducing the pressure of the step's weight on the microscopic metallic surface.

The choice of the footprint was a deliberate strike at human sovereignty. Throughout history, the footprint has been the most archaic and powerful signal of presence: "I was here". By rendering this walk at a scale that is physically present but biologically invisible, I was performing a phenomenological reduction of human trace.

Standing in front of the silicon chip, the observer encounters a paradox: the work exists with absolute certainty - certified by the Department of Physics - but it denies itself to the "bulimic eye" of the contemporary viewer. To see this walk, one must surrender to the mediation of a Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM).

Beyond the pillars of Hercules (2006) | Detail

Working with Prof. Fabrizio Pirri and his team, I discovered something that would become the heartbeat of my research: the relief of being irrelevant. The logical event of that "resolved impossibility" occurred in the laboratory long before any eye encountered it. The meaning of those fifty-four steps did not depend on a witness to be true.

Beyond the pillars of Hercules was my first real exercise in downsizing. I didn't know then that I was writing a research program for the next twenty years; I thought I was just making a small walk on silicon.

As it turns out, I was learning how to vanish in order to truly exist in the periphery of perception.