Daniel Silva: Mildly Anxious Beasts,

Daniel Silva works with materials such as mycelium, beeswax, rubber, charcoal, Japanese sailcloth and ceramics. He has done multiple art residencies in Japan, including a grant from Arts Council Tokyo to develop A Fragmented Garden, a participatory six month project that challenged the definition of a garden and used plant data to inform a site specific installation across various floors of a converted Nagaya house. Mildly Anxious Beasts, is a continuation of A Fragmented Garden and deals with a lot of the same themes and materials. His works seem to become more and more a theatre where nature and technology are intertwined, mixing their agencies so that they appear like organisms that can evolve between design and proliferation, composition and affective disorder. His art is therefore based on a narrative which is connecting nature and technology as a possibility to create liminal states and even a transmutation between different techniques. 

Mildly Anxious Beasts is both the name of the show and the title of an installation. The ambiguity of the oxymoron, “mildly anxious”, and the mix of psychology and animality in the title, show that bestiality can be in men’s heads as much as beasts can be anthropomorphised in our culture. Is toxicity, madness, or an affect such as anxiety, something human? In the end, the visitor is the one connecting the works together, but also acknowledging the fragmentation of a postmodern world where soul and body, the normal and the abnormal, are disjointed.