Ghostland

Ghostland

In our hyper-mediated age, reality increasingly seems to be a “spectral” place; a landscape in which experiences, bodies and events are filtered, translated and recoded through luminous surfaces, screens. Ghostland explores this intermediate space in which we live – a space in which the screen is no longer just a technical device, but a real cultural environment, capable of shaping our perceptions and behaviours, designing collective imaginations.

The visual technologies that inhabit our daily lives – surveillance systems, social interfaces, digital archives, artificial intelligence, flows of information from conflict zones – create a complex emotional geography, made up of apparent proximities and profound distances. Here, the face becomes a mirror, the body a manipulable surface, memory an archive constantly being rewritten, functional to imagining a dystopian future. War, disasters, the alteration of the self and a widespread sense of vulnerability require mediation with the aim of relieving pain and multiplying spectacle in the face of a world that is sometimes impossible to understand and hard to decode.

Thus, in this oversaturated visual landscape, the image acts both as a mirror and a barrier; it reflects desires, fears and aspirations, but also exposes us to forms of control and a progressive anaesthetisation of the gaze.

The screen becomes an ambiguous place where reality breaks down, recomposes and reinvents itself, producing hybrid identities, altered memories and narratives that oscillate between reality and fiction.

Ghostland offers a reflection on how we observe others and ourselves, how algorithms monitor us, how we construct a sense of danger and trust in a future yet to be built.

Through experimental artistic practices, the collective exhibition invites us to recognise the contemporary condition of constant oscillation between presence and absence, between materiality and simulacrum, which characterises our present and our near future. Finally, it is an invitation to reflect not only on what we see but above all on what remains outside our field of vision: the blind spots, the omissions, the spaces where reality continues to elude us or reveal itself only through the frame of the screen.