"Building worlds" by Liam Young. Fundación Telefónica

Throughout the proposal, the Australian architect and filmmaker address the repercussions of the use of technology in our lives and in the cities that we inhabit, combining fiction and reality. The tour begins with "In the Robot Skies" (2019), an experimental short film made with autonomous drones that were programmed with individual behaviors and cinematic criteria of their own. It stars two teenagers who hack the surveillance mechanisms used to keep them apart and send each other love letters. The plot aims to encourage debate on the potential uses of drones as cultural objects and not only for military purposes.

For its part, "New City" (2015) is composed of a set of visions of cities of the not-too-distant future, projecting new cultural, political, economic, and environmental forces and trends. The animations have been made from photographs taken on expeditions and are accompanied by texts by science fiction writers. "Where the city can't see" (2019), a short fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners, proposes a tour of a near-future city through the eyes of the robots that control it.

The works "Planet City" (2021) and "The Great Endeavour" (2022), an unpublished piece, discuss climate change and pose an urgent analysis of the environmental questions we are already facing today. The exhibition closes with "The Emissary," a post-apocalyptic piece, also created for this exhibition. For this work, Young designed, together with NASA professionals, a fictitious spaceship made of non-obsolete materials, which would eternally transmit what we are today. It would be a testimony that one day we existed and also a sort of funeral.

Forgotten landscapes, alien terrains, and industrial ecologies make up the imaginary of Liam Young's work. The installations of this artist, although fictional, are based on a deep and detailed investigation in which design, the study of futures, and the creation of powerful audiovisual narratives converge. The exhibition leaves the viewer reflecting but also leaves a positive message: we must bet on hope against fear and anxiety and put ourselves into action, understanding the future more as a state.

Participating Artist:

The exhibition presents six multimedia artistic productions, made by young artists who practice, as a theoretical background, the language of investigative aesthetics. Ukrainian artist Ciprian Tokar's artistic research focuses on the interference between personal and collective memory of traumatic historical events such as the Maidan Revolution and Russia's brutal attack on Ukraine. His artistic practice is associated with the notion of "expanded painting", "2.0" or "networked" developed by the American art historian David Joselit. By this notion, painting is a visual construct that is based on images extracted from visual communication through mass media and social media.

From another perspective, the artistic works proposed by ALB question the image in its capacity as a communication code. In the current context, where the image proliferates in a deeply virtualized social environment, her artistic practice is a response to this environment, being categorized as antimimetic and non-aesthetic. The refusal to create defined visual representations, and implicitly, the refusal to describe or comment on a supposed reality is accompanied by the challenge of abstraction as a process of mental reduction and essentialization of representation.

The works proposed by Lucian Bran use the analogical image to show how information is interpreted by different types of individuals according to their belief systems. From literary interpretations of the Bible that say the earth is 6000 years old to geological truths such as, the force of gravity tends to flatten the earth's surface over time, etc.

Hamburg-based Russian artist Elizaveta Ostapenko's research focuses on the communicative character of the image. In her case, the production of the image is the result of a deconstructive process, which involves canceling the traditional semiotic functions used in representation. His artistic practice develops a narrative about the image using personal experiences, activities and everyday experiences, inspired by the immediate reality induced by the visual manipulations of mass culture. In contrast, Ana Maria Micu restricted her flow of images to a source that comes from the environment of her own home. The artist exclusively paints scenes from her own apartment, images taken during various artistic endeavors. The painting proposed by the artist represents an unlimited visual examination, a multifaceted presentation of the self.

Sara Muscalu's artistic practice is located at the intersection between painting and photography. It explores the extension and hybridization of the two media, as well as the specificity of these media in relation to their ability to objectively communicate information; in the present case, the information is about the process of erosion and disappearance of public spaces over time, taking as benchmarks the post-industrial condition of Romanian society and the theme of work.

"Unlimited Visuality" is a cultural project co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.