The Animal We Are



 The Animal We Are brings together large-scale works in cashmere, raw silk, and leather that consider the animal body as a reflection of our own—sensual, vulnerable, desired, and consumed.


Burn Out with Benjamin
Cashmere and color silk 
2020


The Animal We Are is an ongoing body of textile and leather works exploring the physical and psychological continuity between human and animal life. Working with cashmere, raw silk, leather, ceramic, and processes of burning, stitching, stretching, and removal, Basso Pietrobon approaches material as skin: something that protects and seduces, but also carries memory, registers injury, and retains the trace of a body.

In the horse works, cashmere forms the body while strands of raw silk become the mane and tail. The animal emerges through the physical qualities of the materials—their softness, weight, movement, and susceptibility to touch. Appearing in increasingly fragmented and abstract positions, the horse becomes both body and mirror, reflecting human ideas of freedom, power, vulnerability, labour, and emotional projection.

The grey burnout works extend this investigation toward the human body. Areas of cashmere are removed through heat, leaving fragile, translucent surfaces suspended between presence and disappearance. In the leather works, the hide is stretched, folded, and stitched over human-scale structures. Its scars, wrinkles, pores, and tonal variations remain visible, returning bodily presence to a material that has been made anonymous.

Across the series, distinctions between human skin, animal skin, textile, and image begin to dissolve. Materials associated with luxury and intimacy are complicated by their origins in living bodies. The works consider the consciousness that moves through human and animal life, and ask what it means to touch, wear, represent, protect, love, and consume another living being.







Systems of ReflectionSilk and cashmere
2020 – current

Systems of exchange mirror the body—reflecting cycles of consumption, projection, and emotional displacement. The horse becomes both figure and device, articulating what the body cannot. Luxurious textiles such as silk and cashmere are shaped into fragmented horse forms, set in tension with industrial and disposable materials.

Referencing the Silk Road—where the exchange of goods was inseparable from the movement of people—the work reflects on a shift toward contemporary systems of consumption defined by distance, speed, and anonymity.

Historically, textiles functioned as currency, circulating alongside bodies, knowledge, and cultural exchange. Today, commodities move without encounter, producing forms of isolation masked as access.

The horse operates as both figure and structure. Long understood as an animal that mirrors human emotion, it becomes a device for reflecting the body back to itself—revealing internal states otherwise unseen.

Across the work, mirroring extends from the body to the market: between presence and absence, exchange and estrangement, what is felt and what is consumed.


Systems of Reflection, No. 1 
Cashmere, raw silk, acrylic paint, linen 
180 x 150cm
2020




Systems of Reflection, No. 1 and No. 2
Cashmere, raw silk, acrylic paint, linen 
90 × 190 cm, 180 x 150cm
2020











Burnout with Walter Benjamin2019 - current 
Cashmere and silk

This work unfolds as a suspended textile composition — a field of cashmere and silk that is stitched, knotted, layered, and allowed to collapse under its own weight. Draped across a metal bar, the fabric resists resolution, existing somewhere between garment, painting, and body.

Emerging from a period of personal burnout, the work reflects on time, exhaustion, and recovery. Its making is slow and repetitive: stitching, undoing, reworking. Threads accumulate, tangle, and fall, tracing a process that is durational rather than outcome-driven.
Burn Out, No. 1
Cashmere and coloured silk
Approximately 230 × 170 cm
2020


The piece draws from Walter Benjamin’s notion of boredom as a generative state — “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” Against a culture of constant productivity, the work proposes another tempo: one of pause, interiority, and attention.

Color appears in bursts — bright, almost excessive — interrupting the neutrality of the base material. These gestures echo both vitality and overload, suggesting the oscillation between energy and depletion that defines burnout.

The hanging form carries a bodily presence. It sags, stretches, and gathers, holding tension between structure and release. What is held together is always on the verge of falling apart.

Rather than presenting a finished object, the work remains open — a record of time, labor, and the fragile process of rebuilding.

Burn Out, No. 2
Cashmere and coloured silk
Approximately 200 × 135 cm
2020


Burn Out, No. 3
Cashmere and coloured silk
Approximately 100 × 65 × 20 cm
2020



Burn Out, No. 3
Cashmere and coloured silk
Approximately 100 × 70 cm; installation dimensions variable
2020




The Skin We SharePhotography, leather
2021-2022

This series of human-scale leather tapestries considers leather as skin rather than surface. Stretched, folded, and stitched around canvas, each hide retains its scars, wrinkles, tonal variations, and physical memory.

The proportions of the works relate to the human body, creating an intimate correspondence between our skin and that of another animal. Within the leather, I see my own body, the body of my dog, and the body of the cow from which the material came.

The works reflect on consciousness and physical presence: the life shared across species, and the material trace that remains when a living body is transformed into an object.


Skin Triptych
Leather, thread and wood frames
100 x 170cm, 120 x 175cm , 165 x 140cm 
2022


Artemisia I (The Skin We Share)
Digital photograph
2023
    

Installation of Artemisia I (The Skin We Share)





* Restriced access
© Jenna Basso Pietrobon

France — Italy