Plastic Futures

Plastic Futures was a five-day exhibition of digital and NFT art at the Mecenate Fine Art gallery in Rome, organised with the platform O-MEE and curated by Adele Lazzeri. The project centred on the exchange between the malleability of the human being and the possibilities of technology, imagining futures in which artificial and hybrid realities take shape, with their utopian and dystopian sides. Alongside the gallery show, a virtual gallery could be visited online and through VR headsets on site, and an open call added new artists to a core group of Italian digital artists: Federico Clapis, Giovanni Motta, Giusy Amoroso, Dangiuz, Exit Simulation and Annibale Siconolfi.

The installation views show the works presented on large vertical screens in black frames, each with the title, the artist's name, the exhibition caption and a QR code, against walls washed in purple and pink light. Clapis showed two digital sculptures staged in the same imaginary setting, a brick niche framed by a stone arch: Baby Drone, the drone that carries a newborn in a sling, here rendered in a rough terracotta-like material on a stone plinth, and Grieving Conception, a cracked female figure whose face is hidden by a block resembling a visor, one hand pressed to the chest and the other open below. In the room the latter hung beside Frozen Synapses by Exit Simulation.

The theme suited the way Clapis uses sculpture: bodies and devices fused into one form, presented here as virtual objects that keep the weight and texture of stone.

Sources

• O-MEE: Mecenate FA Gallery Exhibition Open Call — CuratorSpace