The installation proposed by Liliana Mercioiu Popa, as an extension of the works in the exhibition "Expanded Nature", presents several perspectives of knowledge brought together. On the one hand, it presents the idea of the articulation of life (from a scientific perspective), from the simplest unit to the most complex (atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms... biom, biosphere) and the way they are interconnected, and on the other hand, reflections on the social plane, with the ideologies/images/histories we create over time about the world and their power to influence our existence. In this way, the exhibition space expands infinitely around the viewer, and the geometric figures present multiple possibilities of reconfiguring fixed and moving points.

Liliana Mercioiu Popa: "Based on Michel Foucoult's concept man is a recent invention the work visually articulates itself into a kind of lapidary history of life on Earth, with a little stop in that of man, as it was or could have been written, with what we know or still don't fully understand, with what was a landmark and is no more, with what could have been otherwise (? ).

Thus, after a brief incursion into the first forms of plant-animal life, into prehistoric trees, into fish that have disappeared and reappeared since one extinction to another, into the descendants of dinosaurs - the thousands of species of birds, into moving stones, into global migrations that have taken place since the emergence of humanity, into megalithic circles, the totemic pillars or columns of memory, I stop at a crucial moment, the one that decided the path of the legalisation of knowledge (ralionale), of travel around the globe and colonialism, of the evolution of science, industrialisation and the placing at the centre of technology, which we perceive today, simultaneously, as part of the problem and part of the solution of the capitalocene.

I pause to ask the question - What if?? What if the image of the Vitruvian man, who in the version drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, is placed in a cosmography del minor mondo (of the microcosm), had a greater impact on humanity, along with other representations of the world, such as Anima Mundi or Plato's Timeus, as a correspondence between the micro and macro universe, a world seen as a great living organism, endowed with mind and soul and containing everything (an idea also found in other ancient cultures - Mesopotamia, Iran or China), and not the image of man as a measure for all things, in the sense of conquering/ mastering the world (the Enlightenment image of the world).

The intervention is ultimately about information, both as it is transmitted to us biologically (encapsulated in DNA), but more importantly how we choose to use it consciously and in accordance with the complexity of the world".

The installation is part of the exhibition "Expanded Nature", curated by Ileana Pintilie, which can be visited at META Space until 1 September 2023.