THE COOL COUPLE
Territorial machines: extracting nature

Martina Corbetta_Via Milano, 98. Giussano (MB)
4.04.2025 – 31.05.2025

Territorial Machines: Extracting Nature, the solo exhibition by The Cool Couple at the Martina Corbetta gallery. The project, born from the collaboration between the curator Arnold Braho, Marco Lorenzetti of MLZ Art Dep in Trieste and MAAB Gallery in Milan, consists of a core of unpublished works, and is part of the research developed in the artistic residency that The Cool Couple carried out at the Nirox Foundation in South Africa in 2017. A project promoted by the Italian Council 2020 (eighth edition), a program of international support and promotion of Italian contemporary art of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity (DGCC) of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism. The title of the exhibition refers to the concept of territorial machines, that is, macrostructures capable of codifying organic, animal and human life, but also of producing a certain type of territory composed of a set of signs, practices and habits that organize time and space. This system with neoliberal roots is analyzed by The Cool Couple in the wild context and in particular in the South African one, where the animal industry, privatization and extraction of value from nature, merges the idea of wildlife conservation with market logic.

The contradictions in progress express various controversies: on the one hand, a practice that has made South Africa the country with the most biodiversity in the world, thanks to the proliferation of a huge number of wild animals; on the other, the total reconstruction of an idea of nature as private property and a commodity. The principle of conservation is thus relegated through commodification that guarantees the survival of animal species. Since the end of Fordism, nature has been progressively incorporated by capital, consequently also articulating itself in the techniques of fauna protection. It is precisely the idea of wild nature and its change within our imagination that is staged by The Cool Couple. If lions, elephants, rhinos, impalas, wildebeests, to name a few, play the role of luxury goods managed by private or public parties, how has our way of visualizing the animal world changed? The images present reconstruct a geography of fences, walls and capture systems of the so-called territorial machines, but also the imagination that these same devices produce online. Some of the images were produced through collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI), with the aim of reconstructing an archaeology of domestication, in particular of the wild. The Cute and The Useful, presented last November at the Triennale di Milano, is the medium-length film of The Cool Couple, produced by Careof, which takes its title from an expression used to identify animal species that will survive the current mass extinction due to their emotional or economic bond with humans. Through this project, which includes a video work and a publication published by NERO, the artists delve into the ambiguous relationship between nature and the market and the impact of commodification on our perception of the wild environment. The medium-length film delves into the previously mentioned contradictions of the conservation industry in South Africa: that system that transforms species into luxury goods and stages a “nature” increasingly distant from its original conception, reconstructing an idea of the natural environment that responds to economic ends.