Produzioni Nero

From Saraceno’s introduction: “I have always been completely fascinated by spider/webs. Partly growing up in Italian exile, perhaps it was their ability to make a home anywhere and with materials they carry with them, inside, that so captivated me. Their webs have often been used as an analogy between the cosmic and the terrestrial webs of life, and continue reverberating inside me. Sometimes you can barely see them, and yet they contain a whole world, expressing the immense wisdom accumulated from hundreds of millions of years of life on Earth. Arachnophobia has therefore also always been a great mystery to me. How could anyone fear this small, incredibly sophisticated being? These questions have led me on a path to connect with other people and cultures like myself—of whom there are many, across the globe and throughout time—who do not abhor spiders, but respect them—in some cases, even worship them.” Texts by Claudia Attimonelli, Salvatore Bevilacqua, Gianni Garrera, Tomás Saraceno, Laura Tripaldi, David Zeitlyn. Introductions by the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation team, and Anna Maria Mauro, director of the National Museum of Matera.

Estatico, sperimentale, zuccherino. Nato all’inizio degli anni Duemiladieci dalle manipolazioni sonore di SOPHIE e A.G. Cook, l’hyperpop irrompe nel mainstream con la brat summer di Charli XCX. Flirtando apertamente con la cultura consumistica, la mercificazione sfrenata e la messa in scena del sé, la musica hyperpop esaspera le caratteristiche del pop per portarle all’estremo, in uno slancio al contempo critico e godereccio. Tra colori sgargianti e voci angeliche, velocità vertiginose e artificialità spinta, Julie Ackermann si addentra nella colonna sonora di un capitalismo impazzito, più intenso e violento che mai. Rifacendosi agli strumenti dell’accelerazionismo e profilando l’orizzonte di un’utopia queer nel futuro, Ackermann si interroga sull’ambiguità e sul complesso rapporto che questa estetica intrattiene con il reale. Oltre la satira, oltre la facciata sintetica, l’hyperpop sfugge al cinismo e approda a una nuova forma di sincerità: una post-ironia capace di opporsi al catastrofismo imperante e far implodere la cultura capitalista dall’interno.

The Stream is built around a double re-enactment of painter Léon Frédéric’s eponymous triptych, which is a meditation on the profound connection between humanity and nature. Nedd reimagines this iconic work by photographing a group of Neapolitan youths before the imposing waterfall of Conca della Campania, which transcends its role as a scenic backdrop to emerge as a sentient subject, actively engaging with the human bodies around it. Blurring the boundaries between the organic and the inanimate, Nedd moves beyond conventional iconographic dictates, seamlessly blending and reinterpreting elements from diverse iconographic traditions, such as fashion photography, documentary, and tableau vivant. His lens lingers on discrete people and objects, capturing moments suspended in time, which he later reshapes through postproduction crafting a porous, layered reality imbued with magical neorealism—constantly oscillating between performance and spontaneous ritual.

Deep Fried Feels is a memetic exploration of the contemporary world's crises—or "polycrises," to use an expression made famous by economist Adam Tooze, which emphasizes their interconnected nature—and an "attempt to map out the hypercomplex, interlaced cluster*uck that is the world we are living in." Clusterduck draws on memetic "poor images" found on the fringes of the internet's dynamic and ever-expanding reservoir of content, transforming these motifs into high-resolution works while simultaneously imitating the distortions and noise of traditional "fried" memes. The resulting images capture the dissonant, fragmented nature of our shared online existence through a hyper-saturated aesthetic, and each meme/character they represent serves as a representation of the collective emotions—commonly referred to as "feels"—evoked by local or global polycrises. Chapter by chapter, Deep Fried Feels navigates urgent issues, including the attention economy and data loss, which define and destabilize communication in the digital age, intercepting and reimagining forms of resistance to the ongoing processes of cultural gentrification, searching for spaces of freedom and dissonance. The book is published in the framework of the first edition of the Paul Thorel Prize "L'UNDICESIMA CASA", with the generous support of the Paul Thorel Foundation.