Sarah Ciracì Visual Artist

New Era New Hero, 2022

Handmade ceramics

Series of vases is inspired by Greek iconography of the of the Olympics reinterpreted in a contemporary key. Made by craftsmen specialisedin the reproduction of Greek ceramics, at first glance the vases do not appear dissimilar from the original: The representation of athletes engaged in sports competitions. Only with a closer look one becomes aware that some limbs of the athletes are artificial, they are prostheses of contemporary manufacture. The series has different levels of interpretation: firstly, the posthuman key is reflected in the artist’s interest in science and technology, on the difficult balance between culture and nature and the belief that, following Bernard Stiegler, the human being is fundamentally prosthetic. In this sense, the prostheses of Paralympic athletes belong to a particular category, among the infinite possible, and are therefore in continuity with the prostheses that humans have used every day and always. Secondly, New Era New Hero speaks of a continuity between the support that the Greek athletes of antiquity asked the gods

to obtain victory, and, as a consequence, obtain a superiority that led to differentiation from the common citizen, and the contemporary athlete, with a disability, which calls for the overcoming of all limits through the
use of technology. A technology which, for contemporary humans, is configured as belonging to a divine sphere: originally intended as a project to enhance the senses and the human body, it is now irreversibly bound

to a divine project, in the hands of which humans have placed their practical and emotional life. The Paralympic athletes represent the incarnation of the contemporary hero, superhuman beings in which superiority of spirit is combined with the divine project of technology. Consequently, they become for humanity exemplary models of scientific achievement, which outcome is that nature and culture overlap indiscriminately in this way overcoming the ideology of anthropocentrism.