“Nature is uncomfortable”, Filippo Sciascia says, smiling. We’re sitting outside of the Nonfrasa gallery in Bali, after walking through his exhibition Primitive Learning. The phrase echoes something I’d sensed while moving through the works: an insistence on friction, resistance, on forms and ideas that don’t yield easily to interpretation.

Primitive Learning is not an exhibition that invites quick conclusions. Its materials are slow, heavy, sometimes elusive. It feels that they haven’t been chosen for their formal properties, but for the systems they’re caught up in: geological, chemical, technological, historical.

Walking through the exhibition with the artist, I can’t help but think of the Renaissance — a time when art and science were inseparable, and of figures like Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci and Brunelleschi. Like a modern Renaissance thinker, Sciascia’s curiosity stretches far beyond the boundaries of any one medium. His work draws on contemporary science — from dark oxygen discovered in deep-sea ecosystems, to the quartz found in Bali’s volcanic sand, to bacteria that may one day offer new sources of energy. But Sciascia’s fascination is not in these facts alone. What drives him is a deeper question: can we ever truly discover anything that nature hasn’t already known?

“I find it ridiculous when people say we need to get closer to nature,” Sciascia tells me with a laugh. For him, the idea that we are separate from nature is a delusion — one that has only served to alienate us further from our own origins.

“Nature,” he says, “is uncomfortable.”

We have spent centuries trying to escape nature’s rough textures — paving uneven ground, insulating ourselves from heat and cold, filtering water, regulating air. We’ve designed tools and systems to override what we once depended on: daylight, seasons, weather. Human progress has largely meant converting irregular, unpredictable conditions into controlled environments. But that control is fleeting, and often illusory. The deeper we dig, the more we uncover systems that were there long before us, operating on logics we’re only beginning to understand.

The exhibition is openly didactic, and Sciascia doesn’t shy away from that. Although he leaves room for interpretation, his works are grounded in research and carry a clear conceptual charge. Like much conceptual art, the meaning doesn’t rest in the image alone. Without context, a box on the floor is just a box on the floor. In this sense, “PL – Goa Gajah” (2024), a painting of the ancient cave site, becomes a kind of manifesto. The canvas is lit from behind, so the beams of light appear to come from the outside, but in fact emerge from within. The painting only comes alive when plugged in. It’s a fitting metaphor for Sciascia’s practice — art that demands engagement, curiosity, and the willingness to trace its connections.

Light threads through Sciascia’s world as both signifier and signified. It forms a kind of circuitry linking vision, energy and knowledge. The eye, as Filippo reminds me, was the first organ to emerge in the great biological unfolding that led us out of the sea. Light became the trigger for consciousness. The invention of artificial light — first fire, later electricity — changed the course of human evolution.

In earlier works like Lumina — Triangle Landscape (2017), Sciascia explored the shifting boundary between looking and seeing, between static and moving image. Light in these works wavers between its function as illumination and the more abstract notion of enlightenment. In PL — Goa Gajah the cave becomes a space not just of shelter, it’s a place of knowledge transmission — a site where the impulse to document, to remember, to share, first took visual form.

Framed in aluminium, PL — Goa Gajah carries yet another layer. Aluminium only entered human use once we learned to dig deep enough to extract it. For Sciascia, this is more than material history. Just as we didn’t go far enough into the ground to discover aluminium, he says, we don’t go far enough back in time to retrieve the wisdom of our ancestors. This is the essence of what he calls “primitive learning.” Not primitive in the sense of crude or undeveloped, but primary. Original.

That first handprint on a cave wall was a breakthrough arguably more profound than anything we’ve achieved since. It marked a leap — from remembering to narrating. Today, our obsession with data and artificial intelligence feels like a continuation of that story, but in Sciascia’s view, we’ve drifted from its source.

This return to materials and time is evident in works like “PL — Light + Rock Stain” (2024), where Sciascia sets aside how own authorship. The painting was made not by his hand, but by bauxite stones — the raw material of aluminium — left laying in the open air on canvas to mark it over time. The resulting abstraction references alumina, the oxide derived from bauxite, and recalls the artist’s “Lux Lumina” series. “I couldn’t make an abstraction even if I wanted to,” Sciascia says. “I trained as a Florentine painter.” In these works, nature becomes the collaborator in authors self-proclaimed shortcomings.

Humanity’s need for information, Sciascia says, is its defining trait. We dig, probe, scan. We send probes to comets, plunge into oceans, search the genome. But have we learned anything that makes the world more coherent? Or are we simply building a more orderly illusion?

Sciascia’s “PL — Rosetta Mission” reflects on this. In 2014, the European Space Agency’s Philae lander touched down on Comet 67P, but failed to anchor, landing in shadow and unable to recharge. In Sciascia’s installation, a large light fixture lies face-down on the floor, unable to illuminate. Books about the artist’s own work sit beside it, as if to suggest that even accumulated knowledge can’t always produce clarity.

In “Cable Bacteria” (2024), an overwhelming network of cables spreads across the gallery. The title refers to real bacteria found on the ocean floor, which generate electricity through filamentous structures that resemble cords. Nature has developed this function long before we ever imagined it. Our efforts mimic, but rarely match, the precision of natural systems.

We sit outside the gallery, not saying much. “If you have a phylogenetic mind, you won’t need notes,” Sciascia says. I didn’t take any. His work “Phylogenetic” (2019), which shows a branching diagram of evolutionary lineage, begins to feel like a self-portrait. Knowledge, for Sciascia, is not linear. It branches. Connects. Repeats.

We drift between ideas: walking trees, the chemistry of touch screens, the possibility of electrical life. What becomes clear is the irony of our pursuits. The further we reach outward, the further we move from the knowledge systems that once kept us grounded. And yet, Sciascia’s work doesn’t leave me in despair. If anything, it invites me to dig in. To read more, question more, remain open. Because even in the face of impossibility, there is something unshakeably human about the effort to learn, to remember, and to tell stories.