PRESS RELEASE
AlbumArte
presents
Medianature
exhibition by RUFA Multimedia Arts and Design students
BLIVET, RAFFAELE ESPOSITO E ANNARITA DEBELLIS, SILVIA BALDO, GIUSEPPE DI CAPUA, ELISA CATALANO
curated by Re:humanism
Opening Monday, September 16, 6.00 p.m.
from September 17 to 30 2024
free entry
from Tuesday to Friday 3.00pm – 7.00pm
Saturday by appointment
AlbumArte Via Flaminia, 122 00196 Roma
Medianature is a project by the students of the Master’s program in Multimedia Arts and Design at RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts, curated by Re:humanism and hosted by AlbumArte, an independent center for artistic research and production in Rome. The exhibition’s title is inspired by the work of media theorist Jussi Parikka, who uses this term to propose a new way of understanding the relationship between nature and culture.
Parikka explores how media are not merely tools for representing nature but are themselves participants in the global ecology, shaping and influencing our relationship with the environment. This concept is examined by the three multimedia projects presented for the occasion, which will engage with the exhibition spaces, challenging some of the visitors’ certainties.
Padiglione Invisibile, conceived by the Blivet collective, ironically alludes to the exhibition format proposed by one of the leading contemporary art institutions, the Venice Biennale, but subverts its visibility, inviting reflection on who and what is truly exposed in today’s hyperconnected society. A guided tour invites the viewer to navigate through the spaces of AlbumArte, revealing the underlying logic only at the end and encouraging an act of rebellion against imposed rules.
Cyborg Mama Nature is a large totemic installation conceived by Silvia Baldo, Giuseppe Di Capua, and Elisa Catalano that merges nature and technology and interacts directly with the viewer, fostering a symbiotic relationship between human, organic, and inorganic components through sound. The work, designed for the main hall of the exhibition space, reacts to the movement of visitors, emitting sounds to create an interspecies dialogue. With explicit reference to the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a symbol of progress and human domination through technology, this totemic structure is now reinterpreted in a contemporary key: no longer an emblem of dominance, it becomes a representation of an inclusive, cohabiting, and participatory perspective, where all entities live and communicate in harmony.
Finally, Ecosistema Queer by Raffaele Esposito and Annarita Debellis consists of a series of kinetic installations that produce a primordial storm that disorients, reveals, and “fluidifies” the identities of the viewer. The work represents the bark of a tree made entirely of metal. The bark, in its deepest essence, is not an impenetrable barrier but rather a filter that mediates between the inner being and the surrounding world. Its roughness and crevices express the memory of past experiences and life cycles that repeat eternally. Here, the bark becomes a symbol of contact and exchange, of openness to transformation. The seemingly cold and artificial space reveals itself as a place of rebirth and adaptation, suggesting that technology can become a natural extension of our ecosystem: a living skin in which to establish bonds of care based on the awareness of inextricable interconnections.