From 12 to 15 December 2019 I was selected together with 11 international artists to exhibit at “Connexion Festival” exhibition at “Ex Mattatoio” in Rome.

“Connexion Festival” is a cultural, educational, and collaborative project curated by the students of the Master in Arts and Culture Management of the Rome Business School (RBS). It proposes a unique exhibition and curatorial experience, featuring students based in more than 100 countries worldwide.

The year’s theme was the environment, analyzed from three sub-topics that are natural, spiritual, and virtual (environments). The artwork I decided to present was No disc Found.

The artwork “No disc found” (40 x 40 print on aluminum) refers to collage art, however, permeated by Vaporwave visual current born and developed online around the beginning of the 10s of 2000. The work is connected to the environment under the spiritual and virtual point of view. The smooth-faced man statue image with an empty CD-ROM player grafted onto his head and posture that expresses a sense of loss and pain, wants to be metaphor for the condition of mankind in today’s society. From the virtual point of view, The ever more rapid evolution of technology means that new reading and archiving tools are created which supplant the old ones and, moreover, do not read the previous supports. We have seen floppy disks, VHS files disappear quickly and now the same thing is happening with CDs that are being replaced by hardware tools like USB devices or even online cloud services. Today man also finds himself in the same situation as the modernization and replacement of multimedia systems but on the spiritual level. The tools for understanding the reality of man in today’s society must evolve rapidly to allow it to move freely. This process, however, is arduous and often creates disorientation and unhappiness in the individual who, if not adapted to the environment, is excluded and marginalized by society. So metaphorically, man finds himself in a situation of frenetic development like technology, only that it can be replaced quickly while for man it is not so simple. Also for this reason the statue has no face, its hand covers the face revealing a sense of desperation and disorientation. This symbolizes homologation, the annulment of the individual caused by consumerism and today’s capitalism. The reality in which man lives is inauthentic and unreal based on behavioral models imposed by the mass media, which control lifestyles through fashion and advertising, making us believe that we live a free and self-determined life when in reality it is only an illusion. The modeling of a unique identity is promised when in reality a single model is imposed to conform to it in a serial manner.