Giovanni Aloi

[7] In July 2014, Aloi contributed to the BBC Radio 3 program titled Animals and Anthropomorphism along with animal-studies expert Susan McHugh and novelist Karen Joy Fowler.

Through a multidisciplinary approach, it aimed at facilitating a dialogue between artists, scientists, and academics interested in informing wider audiences through visual communication.

[24] The symposium critically addressed the zoocentrism characterizing the recent years of animal studies to identify new and productive methodological approaches and ethicalities for the biotechnological and biocapital dimensions of the Anthropocene.

Representation, policies, and lived experiences of the Anthropocene were central to this symposium that through the collaboration of artists and scientists working at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago mapped new aesthetic territories for current political times.

The symposium featured the participation of many artists, faculties, and students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a keynote presentation by Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Michael Marder.

[25] In 2019, Aloi was invited to the Getty Center in LA to moderate a discussion about the presence of animals in contemporary art with artists Kate Clark, Claire Owen, and poet Donika Kelly.

In 2021, Aloi has organized multiple discussion panels with artists and scholars in conjunction with the exhibition Earthly Observatory he co-curated with Andrew Yang.

[29] In 2014, Aloi was invited by Jody Berland, Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University to join an international team of researchers working on the subject of animals and digital interfaces.

Artists included in the exhibition: Julie Andreyev, Simon Lysander Overstall, Jonathon Keats, Gwen MacGregor, Neozoon, Ken Rinaldo, Lou Sheppard, Donna Szoke, Sara Angelucci, Ingrid Bachmann, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Wally Dion, and Aki Inomata.

The exhibition brought into dialogue works from local and internationally renowned artists as well as SAIC alumni and faculty and was expressly designed to encourage visitors and students to rethink their conceptions of materiality, agency, empathy, subjectivity, and community at a time of unprecedented ecological crisis and cultural change.

[34] In the summer of 2022, Aloi curated Animal Crossing in collaboration with artist Maria Bronkema for Fountain House Gallery in New York.

This propensity to find beauty and truth in the seemingly unremarkable, the overlooked, and the imperfect led him, under the guidance of his mentor Cedric Morris, to develop a remarkably honest approach to the painting of plants—the foundation of what would become his distinctively raw take on the naked body.

Originally grown in Vienna by the artist’s famous grandfather, Sigmund, cuttings of the plant were passed on to family members as a living keepsake.

Never reduced to passive aesthetic objects, in Freud's work, plants can teach us to fine-tune our attention, observation, and connection to the world around us.

This exhibition is therefore a timely invitation to re-learn how to look at plants beyond the traditional lenses of the symbolic reductionism of religious painting and the objectifying gaze of science.

Between these opposing approaches there lies a valuable opportunity to explore a more personal and intimate relationship that can only unfold in enclosed places like gardens or in the privacy of our homes: a closeness that defines one’s life, memories, and the passing of time.

[46] In 2021, Aloi and Andrew S. Yang were interviewed on WLPN 105.5FM about Earthly Observatory, an exhibition they co-curated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

[68] Since 2016, with curator and writer Caroline Picard, Aloi is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.