I Monster (in Italian, “Io Mostro” carries a deliberate double meaning: “Io” = I, and “Mostro” can be read either as the noun “monster” — I am a monster — or as the verb “mostro,” meaning “I show” — I show [myself/something]. The title holds both readings at once.) originates from a three-year research path undertaken during my studies in Sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, one that moves through medieval bestiaries, nineteenth-century theories of deviance, fairy-tale literature, and contemporary art to interrogate a question that spans centuries without ever being resolved: who is the monster, really?
The word “monster” comes from the Latin monstrum, itself rooted in the verb monère: to warn, to show. From its very etymological origin, then, the monster is not an entity that hides — it is an entity that reveals. It shows, precisely, the only nature it is capable of declaring: its own. This is the conceptual core around which the entire research turns: the monster does not generate violence through what it is, but suffers violence through what is attributed to it by those who look.
In medieval bestiaries, the monstrous animal — the bear, the donkey, the hedgehog — was constructed as a moral mirror of human weaknesses, a catalogue of fears projected onto the body of the other. In the nineteenth century, Cesare Lombroso’s theories turned this projection into pseudoscience: the criminal, the homosexual, the “man of color” were read through facial and cranial features as bearers of a biological anomaly, a hereditary monstrosity to be recognized and isolated. The “freak,” put on display in nineteenth- and twentieth-century sideshows, did nothing but show a body different from the one expected — yet it was the spectator, paying for a ticket to laugh at their suffering, who exercised the real violence.
Through Victor Hugo, Umberto Eco, Erich Neumann, and the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast in its many retellings — from Apuleius to Angela Carter — the thesis reconstructs a common thread: monstrosity is never an intrinsic quality, but the outcome of a social act of separation. It is society that needs the monster in order to define, by contrast, its own presumed normality. It is society that domesticates, judges, mocks, isolating whoever does not fit the life project it has already written for everyone.
The research’s conclusion leads to an even more uncomfortable question: who is the monster today? No longer only someone with a repellent appearance, but anyone “too free from the constraints society imposes” — anyone who openly declares what is supposed to remain hidden: their own homosexuality, like Urs Lüthi; their own illness, like Franco B; their own difference, whatever it may be. The contemporary monster is the one who goes back to showing — and their guilt lies not in being different, but in no longer hiding that difference.
The works born from this research do not depict the monster as a threat to be feared, but as a body that suffers violence simply for existing openly. The truly monstrous behavior belongs to those who watch, judge, mock, and mortify — not to those who, simply, show themselves for what they are.