Gabo’s research process has resulted in the drafting of The Glossary, a dynamic list of words and concepts that attempts to present the human being in its most current state. The Glossary is a work in progress and will evolve over time. For each project or exhibition, Gabo’s artistic production is informed by one or more words from The Glossary. In the triptych commissioned by ARNO, he explores the human being in relation to the socio-cultural and technological contesting which both the individual and collective body operates.

Words in The Glossary such as ‘Self Invention’, ‘Multividual’, ‘Multiplicity’, ‘Monster’, ‘Onanist juvenilism’ and ‘Free Will’ were functional to the development of texts and images presented in the final works. A translation process informs the creation of the three presented works: Lessons, I Picked Up The Silence, A Regression. The words extracted from The Glossary are in fact translated and transformed by Gabo into short stories and photographs. In the final production stage, texts and images are merged to become a single multi-layered body.

Gabo Guzzo is an Italian artist based in London. With an MSc in Economics and an MA in Fine Art, his interdisciplinary approach to art practice encompasses sound, text, video, sculpture, photography and performance. Gabo deals in multiplicities, often merging media in order to create hybrid forms of language. His practice refers to an ongoing research into the meaning of human nature; explores ideas relating to concepts of pure and impure; and draws on the tension between nature and culture, science and myth, chance and control. This subject has also been explored in a conversation between Gabo and Hans Ulrich Obrist titled: ‘On Self Invention in Art’.

Gabo’s work considers labour process theory, social anthropology and debates in contemporary political philosophy, with the aim of examining the critical framework in which art operates today. His writing and performative work has been exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, featuring a live performance dealing in issues of identity, power and otherness.

In The Geological Turn: Art and the Anthropocene at London’s Banner Repeater, Gabo staged a collaboration with scientist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, artist and writer Rasheed Araeen, and writer T. J. Demos.