WRITTEN BY FRANCESCA DEL BOCA

PHOTOGRAPHED BY FEDERICA COCCIRO

TRANSLATED BY FRANCESCA QUAGLIA

“Hence a question came up: how can we develop the concept of intelligence and awareness towards non-human environments? Just think about plants’ intelligence, mushrooms’, octopus’ and other life’s forms. Well, that of the inanimate matter exists too. Inanimate matter is complex and self organized, it changes shape, it grows spontaneously. And that’s where we get to the final quest,  pure philosophy: what’s life, and what do we mean with it?”

“In chemical research there’s spiritual research: the meeting between the matter and its many potentialities is mystical and transformative, as the meeting with the unknown always is. Let’s think about religious rituals and the methods of the scientific gesture, it places mankind in front of the union between spirit and matter, between the known world and the unknown knowledge.”

“Science doesn’t have to be perceived as something prohibitive, distant and difficult. It doesn’t have to be academic, it needs to be open to the public and to the culture that has surrounded it throughout all different historical epochs.”

Laura Tripaldi is a materials scientist and a writer. She works at the intersection between technology, humanities and arts. She’s the author of Parallel Minds. Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022) and of Corpi Ambigui. Sguardi, genere and technology (Einaudi, 2021).

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