The Common Torpedo Runs Now on Autopilot

This exhibition explores the relationship between contemporary routines and what could be defined as Primitive Logistics—a conceptual lens through which can be examined our connection to nature, technological evolution, and the way they influence one another. It reflects on how symbiosis has shaped our past and continues to inform our habits, behaviors, and the ways we perceive interconnections, patterns, and development. In this context, through symbiosis we understand how transitions take place within shared knowledge—how instinctual behaviors and collective memory give rise to what we recognize as innovation, or as forms that support transformation, evolution or improvement. These processes flow seamlessly between the speculative, the sacred, the intuitive and the scientific. Drawing inspiration from the story of the electric fish (Malapterurus electricus, also known as the Common Torpedo), which was used in Antiquity to treat conditions such as migraines, epilepsy, and depression – the show seeks to highlight inherent and almost magical capacities of the things that surround us, especially focusing on how early instincts developed or mutated into rituals and common practices. Long before the rise of modern science, nature offered its own forms of technology—and this fish is a symbol of early bioelectric intelligence. Though not directly depicted in the exhibition, the Common Torpedo functions as a symbolic guide—its presence drawing from references such as the surreal fish in Kusturica’s Arizona Dream or the flatfish in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Like those narrative fish that lead protagonists through strange inner landscapes, the Common Torpedo becomes an avatar for this exhibition’s navigation through objective reality, myth, speculative thought, and intuitive associations. Before electricity illuminated our households, nature revealed its potential through what were perceived as magical phenomena, offering clues about how to harness the materials around us —those that make up our very world. From bacterial existence and co-evolution to ancient superstitions, this exhibition seeks to highlight the development and influence of our relationship with the world and its immediate environment, building a bridge between how speculations, accidents and random happenings can generate paths to new discoveries, and even hope. This connection has shaped who we are today—impacting everything from the objects in our homes and the infrastructure around us, to the formation of communities, future, consciousness, language, and even the very shape of our anatomy. How does identity, and everything surrounding us, come to be governed by networks, mutations, and replication? Everything that exists originated from something, and that something continuously evolves—from shape to concept. Just as myths spread, information embedded in organic matter can be recognized and further developed into technology. While computational evolution has distanced us from the direct perception of how nature powered everything, the virtual medium—through its logic, patterns, and generative capacity—often mirrors the multiplicability and self-organizing systems inherent in nature. Nurturing, caring, conserving, and showcasing are all acts of perpetuating continuity—forms of resistance against erasure, and gestures that acknowledge the cycles of transformation across time, matter, and meaning. They become tools for reconnecting with both ancestral knowledge and speculative futures, revealing how technology, myth, and nature are never truly separate. If you look closely, anything can become a reference—something to be transfigured or used as a resource for enabling and reactivating what already exists around us. The contributions in this exhibition emphasize the ways in which our gestures are perpetuated. Within acts of care, belief, or resourcefulness, the world continuously reshapes itself through subtle shifts and reinventions.