Alessandro Moroni

Call it Yours is my contribution to Subterranean Virtualscape, an online exhibition on Virginia Bianchi Gallery showcasing the work of 15 Italian artists working with digital media. ✨A3 prints available via shopify✨

Call it Yours shows a 3D rendered futuristic residential complex. The work comes from a reflection on the commodification of the concept of utopia from universal project to individualised luxury, tracing a line from mid-century modernist architecture to contemporary forms of gentrification and the language they adopt.

With still images, gifs and sound, the installation works as a stripped-down promotional page, idealising concepts of ownership and desire by the layering of different audio-visual aesthetics, from that of California modernism to those of internet native subcultures from the last decade such as Vaporwave, which questioned the fetishisisation of early visions of internet utopia and technological progress by adopting and exaggerating the looks of care-free consumerism.

Click on the link to visit the exhibition.

SOLARIA develops around ideas of failures and the ruins of the modernist utopia. A voice-over text, halfway between critique and fiction, tells of a recurrent dream where the ghostly image of an abandoned modernist dream is matched by a feeling of anxiety and constant delay, muddling the universal aspirations of this architectural trend with popular belief and superstition. The animation shows a cluster of modernist furniture on which sits a transparent model of a mid-century style home.

In February 2021 I took part in Near Future, a one-day programme on Montez Press Radio focused on the relationship between contemporary art and science-fiction curated by Georgina Tyson.

My contribution was the one-hour radio show the silences we were meant to furnish are now boundless/ the corners we were meant to grace are all covered in dust, the culmination of two years of research around the trend of 24/7 playlists to chill/study to on YouTube and the genre most closely associated with them: lo-fi hip hop.

The show takes the form of a podcast/lecture with the aim of obsessively zooming-in into a hyper-specific aspect of our current reality, unpacking it to the point of revealing how the system we live in operates on a broader scale.

Through the show I analyse patterns of commodification of nostalgia and fetishisation of cultural forms from the recent past. The aesthetics of “lo-fi” and analog media become a tool to idealise better days of consumer capitalism, an ideal where individuals can seek shelter from the anxieties of never-ending recession and the constant threat permeating our post 9/11 reality. I take in consideration this genre’s relationship with earlier versions of internet-native music genres, specifically focusing on how it appropriates some of the most radical elements, such as the highjacking of concepts of authorship, to normalise and domesticate them in service of 24/7 demands for consumption. Reflecting on this relationship with past experiences, I also take the chance to speculate on possible futures for the infrastructures we build to provide solace from the bleakness of our reality.

shattered glass/ empty shells/ wandering ghosts is the fictional counterpart to the silences we were meant to furnish are now boundless/ the corners we were meant to grace are all covered in dust.

This concept album depicts an environment in a not-so-distant future where a 24/7 playlist to chill becomes aware and gains sentience only to realise mankind, the one thing it was meant to perpetually soothe, has gone extinct.

Recognisable mellow beats resurface every now and then from a stratum of unidentified rattling and crackling sounds, mutate into the haunted marimbas of ambient music past, only to progressively melt into drones and wash away in static hiss and white noise.

The album wants to enact something close to a dialogue between a self-aware future version of functional, never-ending music which was once meant to ease our anxieties and the other ghosts we have left to aimlessly roam around the end of times, after the final and fatal collapse of capitalist society.