Curating art, narrating reality.
A place where creativity and research meet.
Here are our projects:
Metal Romance (2019) by Ruby Gloom stages the complex relationship between subject and virtual identity, between the body and its avatars.
Gloom presents its digital alter ego, Ruby, in its ten different versions: Gloom gave birth to the first digital Ruby in 2016, and since then it has never stopped changing its appearance, so that little by little the followers would forget about Gloom physically looked like and could only recognize her digital version on social media.
All the protagonists of Metal Romance have absolute independence from Gloom, so much that they have their own voice, their own character and their own goals; they refer to her as ‘my creator’, and they know they’re her enhanced, improved, freer versions. They are sorts of ‘updated alter-egos’ of Gloom whom the artist recognizes, approves; they make her feel at ease: while Ruby Gloom is insecure, feels awkward and full of flaws, digital Rubies are proud, fierce and their scars are shiny, metallic and charming. They go beyond any gender, form distinctions, away from an organic ground: they have prosthesis, artificial limbs, robotic body parts, plastic inserts. They are cyborgs.
Metal Romance is also the only space – impalpable but no less effective – in which the artist allows herself to have relationships. With their amplified erotic charge, Gloom’s avatars also navigate the world of virtual sexuality: a solitary, often cold dimension that in the frustration of the unfinished and sometimes of self-pity, transmits a total rejection of any biological and organic contact.In fact, the body is not something that Rubies regret or would like to have, it is just an infinite series of constraints and limits: the lightness of being able to recreate new versions of oneself from nothing is priceless.
Metal Romance |Ruby Gloom
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
The Violent Sequence is a silent, multi channel video inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 feature film Zabriskie Point. Antonioni’s first and only Hollywood feature is set in a 1970’s era climate of youth counterculture in the United States. The original film pictures a stylized rejection of commercial and consumer culture and much of the original film was shot on location in the wasteland of Death Valley, California. The film was an overwhelming commercial failure and was panned by most critics upon its release.
The Violent Sequence takes its name from the title of a Pink Floyd song scored for the final scene of Antonio’s film. The song, eventually cut by the director, does not appear on the film’s original soundtrack, but is still used to refer to the final, climatic scene of the film. The final scene—known as ‘the violent sequence’—presents a luxurious hillside mansion explode in a slow-motion montage of orange flame and exploding household items.
Costa’s version of The Violent Sequence is a meditation on the attraction and trappings of consumerism and desire in an on-demand world. Rather than presenting a scene in which household items and objects of mass-production are destroyed, Costa posits another version of reality. The multichannel video pictures an endless sequence in which an array of commercial objects and products orbit, surround and tempt us in a contradicting, slowed down vision of beauty and repulsion.
Joseph Desler Costa is an American / Italian artist working in photography, video and new media. Costa’s practice explores consumerist dreams, pop culture, nostalgia and desire. Employing multiple exposure, re-photography, as well as laser-cut, layered prints, Costa produces almost machine-made looking photographs and films that question and embrace the offerings of commercial culture.
Photographic works are included in the permanent collections of the Leonard Lauder Collection, the Cleveland Clinic Art Collection, BNY Mellon Collection, the Bidwell Collection and the collection of the International Center of Photography.
The Violent Sequence |Joseph Desler Costa
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Factitious Imprints (2016) by Eva Papamargariti is a reflection on an idea of “constructed” nature: it is not only the landscape to be artificial, which the human beings modify, bend to their own needs and consumes, but also the idea of what it is “natural”: what was primordial, what existed before is totally reconstructed. The human traces are so deep that it is often not possible to go back to a time before men.
Papamargariti organizes a patrol in this territory and resumes with a drone the footprints left by humanity: waste, debris, slag and non-bio-degradable waste. The environment shown to us is a clever hybrid between digitally constructed scenarios and shots of real places where the attempts of mankind to insinuate themselves into the biological structure are pervasive: landfills and wind turbines are men’s attempt to create a landscape in which “synthetic” and “biological” coexist indissolubly. The sense of distortion that this investigation of the territory transmits is also visible thanks to the syncopated movements of the drone footage, actually video recordings made with telephones or video cameras.
What will happen to the landscape when we stop observing it? Will these plastic residues remain to testify the landscape of our civilization? Could they be used as finds for an archeology of our era? How will the post-human era be analyzed historically? But above all, will there be a post natural era?
Eva Papamargariti is an artist based between London and Athens. Her practice focuses on moving images but also printed materials and sculptural installations that explore the relationship between digital space and material reality. She is interested in the creation of 2d/3d rendered spaces and scenarios which provoke narrations based on the obscure simultaneous situations happening in a quotidian frequency on the verge of digital and physical environments, blurring the boundaries between these ‘ecosystems.’ Her work delves into issues and themes related to simultaneity, the merging and dissolving of our surroundings with the virtual, the constant diffusion of fabricated synthetic images that define and fragment our identity and everyday experience, the symbiotic procedures and entanglement that take place between humans, nature and technology; again, processes that are established through online presence, as well as the traces that our operations inscribe to the objects and habitat where we find ourselves situated into, through our continuous interaction with devices and mechanic artifacts.
Factitious Imprints |Eva Papamargariti
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
Vello D’oro (2020) is a fantastic narrative of the landscape of Lo Internet. Palamenghi reconstructs a mythology of the Web and its symbols, telling us about the journey of the digital revolution and retracing its iconic motifs and references. The ‘end of Internet’ is narrated by the artist with epic tones as an exclusion from the world, an exclusion from history that, however, occurs within her narrative. Ancient Greek epic is the pivot around which the artist develops her research, to which she gives a always digital formal outcome. The perfect frame for her work is vaporwave aesthetics, with scenes built in the video at increasingly rapid rhythms. Vello D’oro and its legendary healing properties is both an image and a magical tool that has proven useful in this era marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, and at the same time it lends itself to addressing another emergency of our time: the shipwrecks of refugees on the Mediterranean coasts. The fleece offers shelter, protection, and care. It is a kind of life-saving blanket used to assist shipwrecked survivors.
In Vello D’oro Palamenghi explores elements related to the narrative heritage of Western mythology, which after a long process of translation and tradition, have crystallized into the form that is now part of our cultural patrimony. At the same time, she applies these same narrative categories to the story of *Lo Internet* and, with this, the technologies that enabled its dissemination. For Palamenghi, an interesting theme is that of error, which in the translation of language—both verbal and artistic—gives rise to a deviation that modifies the traits of the work, completely renewing it: the glitch trait that defines her aesthetic allows her to formalize this attention to error and give rise to new compositional and expressive standards.
Alice Palamenghi (Gavardo 1992), graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, School of New Technologies for the Arts. She currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. My research is a reflection on technique [techniques and technologies] understood as a mirror to identify the human: technique is a tool that incorporates concepts, books, libraries, language, archives. It is in its garments, culture, and knowledge that the human truly resides. In this reflection (where the human materializes outside of the human), I develop my work by modeling 3D landscapes, re-proposing traces of human presence and its history.
Vello D’oro|Alice Palamenghi
METRONOM| Via Carteria 10 | 41121 Modena
