While we are still unable to fully assess the impact of new technologies related to the visual sphere on artistic creation, it is evident that the massive entry of digital and generative images into media communication (and even into many aspects of daily life) makes the recognition of emerging creative currents more necessary than ever, lest we lose the thread of a discourse that the multiplication of contemporary aesthetics risks rendering aphatic. If on one hand the visual over-production and constant osmosis between areas collateral to the canonical artistic circuit makes it increasingly difficult to have an overall vision, on the other hand considering the dematerialization of the artistic object as a genre niche and not as a further and still embryonic realm of the artwork existence risks bogging down reflection in parameters which are too generic to understand its specificities.
Rino Stefano Tagliaferro, “Peep show” (detail), 2017, video installation, 8 min. ph. credit George Matei, courtesy Vertov Project
That the future of the arts lays in the sign of hybridization is the intuition from which Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo started in 2015 when they created the first edition of Ibrida – International Festival of Intermedial Arts, which from September 25 to 28, 2025 will celebrate this important milestone in its historic venue, Fabbrica delle Candele in Forlì. For the occasion, the two artistic directors have selected from their video archive the works of fifty-five artists from over fifteen different countries, to make them dialogue in the collective exhibition Digital Anatomies (Anatomie Digitali) at Fondazione Dino Zoli in Forlì, renewing the virtuous collaboration already in place. The exhibition path, in addition to documenting these first ten years of Ibrida’s scouting, constitutes an updated reconnaissance of the most recent trends germinated in this field that is by nature metamorphic and magmatic, since each year the proposed visual programming derives from an open call to creatives from around the world, invited to submit their latest works. The exhibition does not intend to pigeonhole a production still in experimental phase, but to treasure the experience to place in a historicizing and thematic perspective a sampling of the most vital instances that have passed (and in some cases started) from Ibrida as a core sampling of an international creative universe still semi-submerged. Alongside the admittedly tickled pleasure of visual flânerie – one of the most appreciated qualities of virtual artworks is the invitation to get lost that they imply – there is therefore that of identifying orientation coordinates in this mare magnum, recognizing some underground common threads in the varied multitude that composes the “digital body”, as the curators themselves define the object of their investigation.
Gary Hill, “Self”, 2016, courtesy the artist and Galleria Lia Rumma Milano – Napoli
In this perspective, therefore, the exhibition path opens in the Genesis section with the SELF ( ) (2016) series by Gary Hill (Santa Monica, 1951), world master of video art and Golden Lion for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1995, invited as the ideal putative father of this evolutionary line of the audio-visual medium, as well as special guest of the tenth edition of the festival. The installation is composed of five minimal white elements equipped with lenses, similar in shape and material to the vision devices used in robotic surgery, approaching which the viewer sees unexpected angles of their own body, filmed in real time by cameras hidden inside each structure. The work, which from a poetic point of view refers to concepts of surveillance and estrangement of the self, more relevant than ever in contemporary artistic reflection, highlights the continuity of this research line with seminal works in the field of video installation, such as TV Buddha (1974) by Nam June Paik or Video Corridor (1970) by Bruce Nauman. In the same room, dedicated to the origins of video art and the medial body, Tierra (2013) by Regina José Galindo documents another important soul of video art, which has its roots in performance and body art, starting from the often violent experiments on the body carried out from the 1970s by iconic artists like Gina Pane and Marina Abramović. In the video proposed in the exhibition, a denunciation of the expropriation of indigenous territories in Guatemala, the skin is not torn by any intentional wound, but the risk for the artist is real, with the large bulldozer digging the ground around her tiny naked body until isolating her on an unstable promontory surrounded by a deep pit.
AA.VV., “Anatomie digitali”, installation view at Fondazione Dino Zoli, Forlì, ph. credit George Matei, courtesy Vertov Project
The same ethical tension of performative matrix is found in Gente comune (2021) by Filippo Berta, winning project of the Italian Council 2019, in which the artist has commissioned citizens from Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Greece, North Macedonia, Mexico, United States and South Korea to count aloud, in their native languages, the sharp points of the fences that mark the conflictual territorial borders of their countries, bringing them together in an emotional polyphonic chorus invoking the dismantling of ideological barriers. A further foundational aspect of video art is its inevitable link with experimental cinema of the origins, which at times resurfaces as a stylistic reference even in recent works. Exemplary in this sense is Sign (2021) by video artist, photographer and composer Robert Cahen (Valence, 1945), another prestigious presence in the exhibition, whose research since the 1970s explores the notion of passage (from still image to moving image, between different places and times, from gaze to filmed reality) as well as the exploration of sound in relation to image. The film is an epic sequence of digital dissolves (which recall the analog abstractions of pictorial stamp of cinematographic avant-gardes) rhythmed by a pressing symphonic soundtrack composed by André Bon, also referring to the emotional emphasizations operated by silent film soundtracks. In the film, natural landscapes, bodies and crowd scenes in black and white pass into each other without interruption, in the symbiotic flow of music and image.
AA.VV., “Anatomie digitali”, installation view at Fondazione Dino Zoli, Forlì, ph. credit George Matei, courtesy Vertov Project
The subsequent sections in which the exhibition is articulated (Electronic bodies, Anatomy of the sign, Ibrida Prize and Signals) show how the foundational instances represented in the first room are declined in different aesthetics and theoretical approaches in various artists, with a progressive increase of stylistic or conceptual suggestions coming from the virtual sphere. As a sample and in random order we point out: the pulsating body-sculptures of Dehors/Audela in Red (2023), trapped in monochrome screens, the ritual wandering of a new Medea in search of her lost children in Pietas (2018) by Elisabetta Di Sopra, mythological sublimation of the tragic shipwrecks of migrants in the Mediterranean, the intelligent critique of media adulteration of truth by Miguel Rozas in The creative act (2021), video montage of footage from the European Parliament in Brussels accompanied by reflections on artistic creation by Marcel Duchamp. And again, the evocative images by Hiroya Sakurai in The stream VIII (2017) that probe what happens inside an artificial irrigation system up to the outlet to the sea, a progressive dissolving of the artificial structure in the bubbling of life, the visionary apartment inhabited by surreal creatures imagined by Albert Merino in Le monde sublunaire (2023), the complex techno-vintage settings by Francesca Fini in Binary blues (2023) or the impossible spatial-temporal co-presences triggered by Martìn Còrdoba in Gare Paris-Saint Lazare (2017) starting from the reworking of real crowd footage. A sample of the most recent virtual reality technologies could not be missing at the conclusion of this excursus: VR-Boy (2018-2025) by Igor Imhoff, accessible by one person at a time through a headset, immerses the viewer in a disturbing nocturnal landscape, whose mysterious quiet is at times interrupted by the sudden irruptions of a cybernetic child. The work establishes an ironic counterpoint with Peep Show (2017) by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, a deceptively demodeè video installation inspired by the first “immersive” optical instruments in history, in which artificial intelligence animates the characters of some famous erotic paintings from the past.
Info:
VV. AA. Digital Anatomies
curated by Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo
01/09/2025 – 12/10/2025
Artists: Gianluca Abbate, Alessandro Amaducci, Karin Andersen, Apotropia, Elena Bellantoni, Filippo Berta, Sara Bonaventura, Robert Cahen, Matteo Campulla, Rita Casdia, Carlos Casas, Georgios Cherouvim, Citron/Lunardi, Zlatko Ćosić, Martín Córdoba, DEHORS/AUDELA, Brecht De Cock, Iginio De Luca, Silvia De Gennaro, Sandrine Deumier, Michele Di Pirro, Elisabetta Di Sopra, Ilaria Di Carlo, Felix Dierich, Francesca Fini, Laura Focarazzo, Regina José Galindo, Daniele Grosso, Marcia Beatriz Granero, Gary Hill, Igor Imhoff, Jacopo Jenna, Yoshihisa Kitamura, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Francesca Lolli, Marcantonio Lunardi, Eleonora Manca, Antonello Matarazzo, Sofia Melikova, Albert Merino, Ethann Néon, Donato Piccolo, Luis Carlos Rodriguez, Miguel Rozas, Hiroya Sakurai, Ursula San Cristobal, Guli Silberstein, Valentin Sismann, Lino Strangis, Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, Cosimo Terlizzi, Devis Venturelli, Virgilio Villoresi, Debora Vrizzi, Hernando Urrutia, Shon Kim.
www.ibridafestival.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
NO COMMENT