Feral Kindness

“Good manners” are something we learn before we even know what they are.
Long before we are able to name the rule, we have already learned to correct ourselves and prepare our bodies to become socially legible.

Feral Kindness, an exhibition by Galamb Thorday and Claudia Petraroli, curated by Giorgia Aprosio, retraces in reverse the process through which we prepare ourselves to be seen.

The title brings together two words that seem to repel one another. “Feral” evokes what is wild, animal and untamed. The term, which has no exact equivalent in Italian, is used to describe animals that were once domesticated but have since returned to the wild. “Kindness”, by contrast, suggests gentleness and care. It is a reassuring disposition towards others, but also the socially acceptable form assumed by a body trained to appear agreeable. Their conjunction produces the oxymoron from which the exhibition unfolds: how much instinct persists in the gestures we have learned, and how much discipline lies hidden within the forms through which we make ourselves agreeable?

The exhibition begins with the explicit dimension of social ritual and the public performance of femininity. It then moves through the private rituals of care that prepare it to be enacted, before bringing visitors into contact with the inner voice through which the subject has learned to monitor, discipline and modify itself.

In the first room, everything seems ready to be looked at, yet something has already exceeded the limits.
Positioned opposite the entrance,Host of Guests (2026) places the viewer in the position of someone arriving at a party and encountering an unexpected scene. A group of women in evening dresses surrounds a naked man lying at the centre of the composition. His body serves as a surface on which sushi is served, while the circular arrangement of the figures creates a kind of ravenous arena around him.The scene reverses the gender roles typical of the imagery of nyotaimori, an eroticised Japanese gastronomic practice in which food is served on the naked body of a woman. The reversal changes the direction of the gaze without neutralising the violence implicit in the scene. Immobilised in a pose that would be impossible to sustain, the man gives way and melts, adapting to the function imposed on him, while looking at us through the reflection of a champagne flute that magnifies his eye.

The champagne flute returns inFizz and Feathers (2025) andThe Master of Margaritas (2025), two paintings facing each other from opposite sides of the room. Both are constructed around a pyramid of glasses and function as opposing poles: in the first, the glasses are still facing upwards, while in the second they are overturned. The almost ornamental chime of the goldfinches on the glass of the still-full vessels gives way, in the neighbouring painting, to the women’s clamorous voices, which reverberate among the overturned glasses and seem to invade the room.The composure of the pose turns into euphoria, while grace slips into a collective excitement verging on the animal.

In the same room, Petraroli’sVia il dente, via il dolore(2023) concentrates this same tension within a few millimetres. Inside a small steel box, similar to those used in jewellery, lies the artist’s wisdom tooth, covered in gold obtained by melting down a ring that belonged to a relationship that had come to an end. The title refers to a familiar Italian consolatory expression, according to which removing the cause of suffering should also put an end to the pain. An evolutionary remnant of a now-lost primitive function, a fragment of the artist’s body and a symbol of a broken bond, the tooth has been transformed into an artwork and is now offered for purchase by third parties.