Research




Context


Like many, I strongly believe that the times we live in, dominated by an exploitative, growth-based  and profit-oriented economic paradigm, call for an existential reassessment of where humanity as a whole is going. This feels at once urgent, abstract and impossible. Most of the concrete things we can do — voting, writing letters and petitions, changing our consumption habits, etc. — seem irrelevant in the face of the structural nature of the problem. Well, organizing helps. Protests are necessary. But language itself seems too indebted to economics to adequately formulate the questions we must address. If we want to reconsider the very idea of how things are organized on the most primary level, then what building blocks, what units, what metrics can we use that are not already the design of the existing organization? What are the poetics of change when it comes to structures, systems and economics?

I try to make works that translate at least some of these questions into something tangible.



About my work


I'm interested in the relationships we develop with the structures and systems in which we live, and the changing values and beliefs that define these relationships. Through my research and work, I explore themes of social order transformation, paradigm shift and power structures. This exploration takes a variety of forms: paintings and drawings, sculptures and architectural installations, data visualization and live systems.

Although I work across mediums and disciplines, painting is the medium with which I have the deepest involvement. My process, from research to drawings to photoshop sketches to color tests to final paintings, usually stretches over months, and this methodology also serves as the testing ground for ideas that will later take form in other mediums.

Other works and projects are conceived as dynamic components made to interfere with the larger economic structures we inhabit. These projects operate as interactive and functional mechanisms, such as economic systems (The Time of the Work, 2016), think tank sessions (Built-In, 2019), surveys (Existential Issues: A Mapping Exercise, 2019-2020) or system embodiment (Les voix, 2023).

I try to make works that feel like visions or premonitions, and that offer enveloping experiences where viewers can let themselves fall into a contemplative. I'm interested in the possibility of slowing down time, of providing a multidimensional space where complex ideas, from political polarization to AI-Human ethics, can be explored through the gentle softening of a perceptual experience.


Experiments


Surveys & Data Visualization

At several recent exhibitions, I invited visitors to take part in a variety of experimental investigations into existential questions. The aim was to test different methods in order to obtain multidimensional answers and results that visually demonstrate the complexity that is often left out of data visualization. The aim is to challenge the way we represent the world through data, and to propose experimental alternatives to conventional measurement systems.



The results, as well as the original questionnaires, are published with an interface allowing different types of visualization.

[View results & more info]



Common Pool
In collaboration with Amanda Vincelli.

Common Pool is an experimental economic tool that we are currently working on, in parallel with our respective occupations. Our goal is to develop an online network that allows optimal non-monetary exchanges of goods and services. The system is designed to combine the flexibility of a gift economy, the practicality and accountability of time banking, and the civic engagement involved in the practice of commoning. 



We want to develop Common Pool as a toolkit that could be used and adapted by different communities according to their specific needs and context, while the system would remain compatible across all participating communities.