The Virtue of Donkey

Mixed-media sculpture
2023

In The Virtue of Donkey, the donkey becomes both apparatus and apparition – a restless form of the body without organs. The body drags its own head as commodity, as ghost of command. The split is laid bare: the brute animal labour of the body, the reflective selfhood of the head – each dependent, yet now dis-integrated. It is the self turned into its own object, condemned to carry what once guided it.

Here the humble beast of burden transmutes into the tragic philosopher of labour-history: the worker who does not recognise his burden, the donkey that does not pause for triumphant revolt. In a dark dialectical humour, the beast carries not a cross but its own consciousness as corpse.

Borrowing the language of the games, the piece reads like a toy caught mid-game: rules broken, pieces swapped, the field of play haunted by the weight of work and ideology. The spectacle of survival persists: labour beyond meaning, movement beyond recognition, a body without organs still insisting on drag, procession, play.

Casted Rubber, Wood
29x39x118 in. (75x100x300cm)
Photography: Antonio Parente