Black Mirror

Luca Rossi’s Black Mirror project at the Prada Foundation in Venice, insinuates itself into the normal activity of the Foundation and does not require any official status, as it does not require any expenditure of resources. It represents a form of “ecology of art”, extremely important in a phase in which we are all producers and consumers of content.

The “black screens” are conditioners  that accompany the official exhibition of the Prada Foundation in Venice. Objects apparently marginal, invisible and therefore effectively “extinguished”, compared to the official visit route. In reality these huge black and ultra-flat screens are extremely significant in a historical phase in which we are all producers and consumers of content. Gilles Deleuze said that we don’t need to express ourselves, we do it too much. We need interstices of solitude and silence to finally say something true.

The creation of the work of art loses its contours, like the project of Luca Rossi, unofficial, clandestine but inexorably present in the spaces of the Prada Foundation.

To see the works you need to have the ability of this side view, unusual and a bit crazy.

The large black conditioners, present in all the halls of the Fondazione Prada, appear in all respects as large inexorably turned off screens. What happens if the screen of our mobile phone or our computer does not turn on anymore? What does it mean today to recover a moment of silence and decompression? How can all this frighten us?

 The project does not bring any object, no new content, inside the Foundation, does not require an invitation from the curator or the Foundation itself, does not add other works and other contents to a continuous production of texts, videos, works and images of which we are all producers and consumers. A hyper production that brings suffocation, anesthetization, impossibility of deepening, and the destabilization of the concepts of truth and experience. These problems flow into our private life but also into the big questions of our time (immigration, climate change, economic system crisis, artificial intelligence, etc.). We pass from the ability to face problems and make them real experience, to the ways in which they are communicated. In other words, it tends to become more important to “share living content” than “to live”.