Daniel Silva: Mildly Anxious Beasts

Daniel Silva works with materials such as mycelium, beeswax, rubber, charcoal, Japanese sailcloth and ceramics. He has done multiple art residencies in Japan. His latest grant was from the Arts Council Tokyo to develop A Fragmented Garden, a participatory six month project that challenged the definition of a garden and used plant data to inform a site specific installation across various floors of a converted Nagaya house. Mildly Anxious Beasts is a continuation of A Fragmented Garden and deals with similar themes and materials. His works seem to become more and more a theatre where nature and technology are intertwined, mixing their agencies so that they appear like organisms that can evolve between design and proliferation, composition and affective disorder. His art is therefore based on a narrative which is connecting nature and technology as a possibility to create liminal states and even a transmutation between different techniques. 

Mildly Anxious Beasts is both the name of the show and the title of an installation. The ambiguity of the oxymoron, “mildly anxious”, and the mix of psychology and animality in the title suggest that beasts can live in people’s heads as much as they can be anthropomorphized in our culture.

Is toxicity, madness, or anxiety something human? In the end, the visitor of Mildly Anxious Beasts is the one connecting the works together, but also acknowledging the fragmentation of a postmodern world where soul and body, the normal and the abnormal, are disjointed. In that sense, these works can appear like post-human grotesque masks that could show a resurgence of the wildness and intensity of the body that was erased by industrial modernity. Indeed, the beasts show the impulsive violence of a remnant body which would be controlled by digital intelligence : the idea that we live in primitive bodies with technological tools that unsettle our existence. It shows, with powerful effect, the explosion of the organs, the emotional disruption of the technics inside bodies while returning energy to those bodies that eventually remain as sensual memories of a disturbing aesthetic experience.

- Fanny Fontaine

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