Sea Storm (Draft)

Sea Storm (Draft) – a work in progress situated between art and academic research – presents visual materials on marine animal sexualities that were once censored, deemed aberrant, and interpreted in ways now open to reimagination. Thanks to a residency phase (April–September 2025), the project was first exhibited in draft form at Casa degli Artisti and will ultimately culminate in installations in international natural history museums. Its aim is to challenge the conventions of traditional dioramas—where taxidermied animals reinforce constructs of sexual normativity and gender binarism—by reclaiming visual representations of animal sexualities from the archives.

Drawing from these rediscovered materials, artist Benedetta Panisson leads viewers into a disturbance—a "storm" that exists only in the eye of the beholder. This storm appears in the exhibition both as a film photograph capturing the eye of a sea storm, and as a sound installation composed by the artist using storm recordings collected across various seas and oceans, filling and unsettling the exhibition space.

Each time a new archival trace of animal sexuality surfaces, a storm disrupts the exhibition space—granting the material visibility, enveloping the audience, and diminishing the centrality of the human gaze.

In the exhibition at Casa degli Artisti (Summer 2025), two case studies from this broader project are presented alongside the storm’s sound installation. The first is a 1993 video—shown here in full for the first time thanks to the collaboration with the archives of WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)—depicting two male octopuses of different species engaged in a sexual act in the deep sea. Each time this footage has surfaced, whether in scientific contexts or the media, it has been met with interpretations that, through the lens of queer theory, gender studies, and animal critical studies, are now ripe for re-evaluation. The history of this video forms the basis of Panisson’s academic project titled Sexual Display from the Abyss: Octopuses between Heteronormativity and Exorbitance, published in Matter Journal, Vol. 7 (2023): Situating Research on Art, Technological Practices, and Literature. The project was also presented at the 11th European Feminist Research Conference, organized by AtGender (Netherlands) and the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2022.
Read the full article here: Matter Journal Vol. 7

The second case features a 1911 photograph of two penguins in Antarctica, taken by George Murray Levick during a Cape Adare expedition. At the time, it led to the birds being labeled as “perverted.” Unearthed by the artist in the archives of the Natural History Museum in London and thanks to NHS collaboration, this image is exhibited here for the first time. Hypothesized to be one of the earliest photographic images of animal sexuality, it is now at the center of an upcoming academic publication (Durham University, UK).

https://www.casadegliartisti.org/evento/mostra-sabine-graziano-benedetta/

https://www.casadegliartisti.org/evento/sexual-display-from-the-abyss/

Technical Details
- Sea storm eye, b/w photograph from negative film printed on photographic paper, 150x110 cm.
- Seas Storm Sound Installation, sound, 5 minutes loop.
- B/W photograph from original negative plate shooted by George Murray Levick, 1911, Antarctica. Full caption: Murray Levick, George, photograph, 1911, Zoological Notes from Cape Adare, Vol. 2 - Photograph (1), Library and Archives, Natural History Museum, London. Not for sale
- Octopus Video, 16 minutes loop, digitalized betamax. Full Caption: Courtesy of Richard Lutz, Rutgers U./NSF/DSV Alvin/1993 © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Not for sale