GUCCI Cyborg

The challenge of the disciplinary power is to impose a precise identity on the subject. This operation is carried out placing the subject inside binary fixed categories, as the normal/abnormal one, with the specific intent of classifying, controlling and regulating the subject.

 

 

The regulative strategies prove so alluring that the subject voluntarily chooses to stick to that particular categorization, claiming its positioning inside a given social structure. In this frame of reference, the regulation of the living body uses the concept of identity as a device of bio-political control (M. Foucault).

 

 

Identity, though, is neither a natural matter nor a preset category, which can be imposed with violence. It’s not an immutable and fixed fact, rather a social and cultural construction and, as such, it’s a matter of choice, joining, invention. Identity, thus, is a never ending process, keen on new determinations each time. The consciousness of how everything is socially built, even who we are, opens a field of fresh possibilities to performatively explore. A field of liberty and responsibility in which anybody can become who he/she really wants to be, getting social expectations and personal desires back in the game.

 

 

The subjectivities embodying Gucci’s pluriverse move in this field, which is ethic and political at the same time. They represent the invitation to diverge, not conforming to univocal and other-directed identity models, and the encouragement to spread other ways of thinking about ourselves that are able to violate preset categorizations. In this regard, what can seem atypical, anomalous, flawed to a normalizing eye, acquires a new legitimacy. A new breath. The courageous affirmation of the self and its singularity.

 

 

The collection goes further beyond, taking the shape of a genuine Cyborg Manifesto (D. J. Haraway), in which the hybrid is metaphorically praised as a figure that can overcome the dualism and the dichotomy of identity. The Cyborg, in fact, is a paradoxical creature keeping together nature and culture, masculine and feminine, normal and alien, psyche and matter. Conflicting with any category grid, the Cyborg is the expression that blends different evolving identities. Hybrid and shifting identities, built on multiple belongings, that transgress the normative discipline.

 

 

Gucci Cyborg is post-human: it has eyes on its hands, faun horns, dragon’s puppies and doubling heads. It’s a biologically indefinite and culturally aware creature. The last and extreme sign of a mongrel identity under constant transformation. The symbol of an emancipatory possibility through which we can decide to become what we are.