Molotov Mind

This artwork represents the burning chaos inside my mind with all the intrusive thoughts and negative emotions I've been struggling with all my life. And yet, at the same time, isn't my mental state a reflection of this society's insanity? How is anyone supposed to feel safe and at peace within a system that enslave, torture and slowly kill us together with the planet we live in and exhaust the natural resources we depend upon? I can't disentangle my personal experience as individual of mental illness and neurodiversity from the evil plaguing our everyday life, that I represent as rats. Indeed, for me rats are the depictio of all the negative emotions and the worst vices that move us humans towards destruction of the Other and self-annihilation. Rats live hidden within the walls of our homes, inside the sewers of our cities...they are everywhere. We coexist with them, pretending they are not there, just like we do with all the anger, grief, sadness, anxiety and so on...we bottle up. Since we don't want to feel anything that doesn't fit the aesthetically pleasing image on our Instagram or TikTok accounts. And in the meanwhile, the rats are feeding on our passive-aggressive silence and they are getting bigger and bigger. All these repressed bad feelings are looking for a way out and we desperately try to bury them under loads of consumerism and addictions. And in the meantime the rats are taking more space and devouring all that's beautiful and good in our lives. That, I think it's the root of every human tragedy. Billions of people trapped on the same planet with infinite hoardes of rats haunting their minds.