By Dr. Anika Scholz, Professor of Art Theory for the Handbook of Lesser Known Artists
In an age saturated by digital replication and hyper-visible authorship, Silvio Neris (b. 1961, Ferrara, Italy) offers a profoundly unsettling counterpoint: artworks that eat themselves.
Best known for his decades-long project, Codex Termitaria, Neris created works in a medium so strange it was initially dismissed as grotesque gimmickry: termite-generated manuscript destruction. In other words, he invited colonies of termites to “edit,” sculpt, and gradually consume handwritten texts of his own composition,treating insects not merely as metaphors, but as collaborators.
The result? A body of work that exists in perpetual erasure,art as a pact between creation and disappearance, authored by both man and insect.
Origins: The Lexicon of Devouring
Silvio Neris trained first as a calligrapher in Bologna before earning a degree in comparative theology. He was obsessed from a young age with medieval manuscripts, particularly palimpsests,texts overwritten, scraped away, fragmented. “The absence of language was more potent than the words themselves,” he wrote in his early notebook Lacrima Scripturae (1982).
But it wasn’t until a fateful trip to Surinam in 1991 that Neris encountered the Nasutitermes genus of termites,wood- and paper-consuming insects that would become the medium of his life’s work.
Rather than preserving ancient documents, Neris began to create manuscripts for destruction,dense, ornate calligraphic texts inked with a homemade blend of linseed oil and honey, designed specifically to lure termites.
The Termite Manuscripts: Method and Meaning
Neris’s process was both scientific and ritualistic. First, he composed philosophical, spiritual, or artistic treatises in meticulous calligraphy,never typing, never scanning. He would then encase the manuscripts in glass-walled termite enclosures, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years. Over time, the insects would carve tunnels through the pages, eroding text, reconfiguring syntax, and leaving behind abstract voids, natural glyphs, or complete annihilation.
These works were not preserved as static objects. Rather, Neris documented them only occasionally with high-resolution scans,once before exposure to the termites, once after, and often, not at all. “What matters is the gesture of surrender,” he insisted in a rare interview. “The artist must relinquish final authorship.”
Select pieces, like Fragmentum XIII (on the death of snow), feature pages half-eaten, with fragments of Latin drifting through the ruined paragraphs. Others, like Codex Nullus, exist now only as a title,completely consumed.
Exhibitions: Devouring the Viewer
His 2004 solo show at the Fondazione Prada, Mandibles of Life, was a turning point. The centerpiece, a 32-page theological tract on silence, was presented mid-consumption. Viewers witnessed the insects slowly erasing the text over the course of the exhibition.
Some critics were repulsed; others awed. Philosopher Claire Badiou attended and later wrote: “Neris creates a theology of absence through the appetite of lesser beings. It is the most honest eschatology I have seen.”
The artist’s refusal to frame the termite as “metaphor” infuriated many. “They are not symbols,” he insisted. “They are editors.”
Subsequent exhibitions in Berlin, Kyoto, and São Paulo emphasized performative decay. The installations featured ambient microphones picking up the faint crackle of termite mandibles, giving voice to the act of artistic destruction.
Collapse and Withdrawal
In 2015, Neris staged what was billed as his final work: Index Moriturae, a library of 108 handwritten books, locked in wooden cabinets seeded with termites. Each cabinet was sealed, never to be opened. The titles were announced publicly, but the contents were to remain unseen until fully devoured.
This act,part disappearance, part protest,was in response to what he called “the ruinous hunger of the market for permanence.”
Afterward, he withdrew from public life. Rumours persist that he continues his work in a monastery outside Mantua, feeding insects with inked meditations on impermanence.
Critical Legacy: Anti-Archival Aesthetics
Silvio Neris’s practice,situated at the cross-section of environmental art, performance, manuscript culture, and speculative theology,resists easy categorization. Is it destruction or collaboration? Sculpture or language? Is the termite a tool or a co-creator?
What’s clear is that Neris expanded the role of the artist into domains of inter-species authorship, consumptive aesthetics, and radical anti-preservation. In an era obsessed with metadata, permanence, and visibility, he dared to make work that refused all three.
His influence is beginning to show. Recent “bio-degenerative” artists, like Lena Xu and the Spore Collective, have cited Neris as a key inspiration. So too have post-human theorists and ecocritical philosophers. His few interviews are now taught in MFA courses as primary texts on aesthetic self-erasure.
It is only right to give Neris the last word. He made a fitting comment in 1998. “The greatest beauty,” he said, “is what you made knowing it would not last.”
