The pandemic has brought humanity back again to take on the greatest anguish, the fear of death and thus, the return to nothingness. Greek philosophy conceives as the original evidence, the starting point of the philosophical-metaphysical journey and even those like Parmenides who affirm the illusory character of becoming because they are convinced that they see the coming out of things from nothing and their return to it.

How then not to remember Emanuele Severino on technique that from being a means of human action to achieve results and to obtain ends has itself turned into an end. In the religious sphere we recall the sacred scriptures in Genesis, “Remember man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return?”
Fundamental questions, then, continually arise and recur in the philosophical, religious sphere and to which the artist cannot be indifferent.

Fear that Science and Technique (to quote Severino) seemed deputed to defeat in their scientific advancement and that the Pandemic has downsized and ridiculed. Technique, which from being a means of human action to achieve results and ends has itself turned into an end.

The Pandemic, therefore, brought mankind to confront again with progress, science and technology that obnubilated death, eroded from the collective imagination, and scientific progress in both medical and technological fields promised immortality to humankind, promises that proved vain. We have marginalized the thought of death as technology (medical, engineering, genetic), from a tool of world domination has become with exponential progression a worldview that we all unwittingly share. A life as accumulation, death as expiration to quote Baudilliard.

Great civilizations in the past (think of the ancient Egyptians) confronted death in a direct way with great funerary constructions, with the preservation of the body after death, with processes, techniques and artistic paths that brought humanity face to face with the inescapable.

Artists with King Pfizer’s work with their work compressed into a creative algorithm
the characteristics of our time, where the hero and the divine are summed up and subsumed in a pharmaceutical company that you can trade, buy and sell, that generates wealth, that emanates power, that governs the world and the fate of humanity.

There are countless historical references in art between Vanitas and death in art to Damien Hirst’s most recent works, where the artist intended to assert that science has created a new culture that focuses on the body understood as a mechanism, that science is the new religion for many people, the idea that science can heal, save, resurrect someone, this is science understood as religion.