An Anatomy of Fear

An Anatomy of Fear takes its title from a 1961 cover of Time Magazine inspired by Munch's The Scream, and explores the internal and external fears of a generation shaped by uncertainty and instability. Like Munch, the project reflects on the psychological effects of modern alienation and existential unease.
At its core, the work investigates identity as a relational and evolving process, focusing on subjects-particularly adolescents-who exist in a state of transformation, suspended between what they are and what they might become. This tension between form and possibility runs throughout the project.

Produced within an art high school in Italy, the work follows the parallel development of students and their sculptures from the beginning of the pandemic to 2025. The unfinished clay and plaster busts, often covered in plastic to preserve their malleability, appear as bodies in formation-fragile, uncertain, and in flux. Their surfaces, which both reveal and conceal, act as metaphors for an inner condition of becoming.

In this suspended state, time seems to pause. Fear, rather than being paralyzing, becomes a generative force-an essential part of the creative process through which form, before fully emerging, confronts its own vulnerability and finds life within it.