This one-day conference is an interdisciplinary event taking as its starting point the fragmentation thesis, based on the observation that our political conversations online – in forums, social media platforms, or discussion sites – are secluded into ideologically uniform groups. This tendency towards homophily is nothing new yet it has dramatically taken speed recently, to the point that it can be seen as a planetary condition of our times. The infrastructural changes in our digital networks – privatization, tracking, and algorithmic rationality – are not the sole explanatory factors. Finance capitalism, genocidal conflicts, climate crisis, as well as ambient anxiety all trigger responses that tend to favor withdrawal strategies.
Research project (2025) with Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Stéphanie Moisdon, Shirin Yousefi
This one-day conference is an interdisciplinary event taking as its starting point the fragmentation thesis, based on the observation that our political conversations online – in forums, social media platforms, or discussion sites – are secluded into ideologically uniform groups. This tendency towards homophily is nothing new yet it has dramatically taken speed recently, to the point that it can be seen as a planetary condition of our times. The infrastructural changes in our digital networks – privatization, tracking, and algorithmic rationality – are not the sole explanatory factors. Finance capitalism, genocidal conflicts, climate crisis, as well as ambient anxiety all trigger responses that tend to favor withdrawal strategies.
The common and the 99% now tend to give ground to decentered small-scale, semi-private, invite-only forms of thinking, making, connecting, and building – in art, activism, fandom and worldbuilding alike. This strategy is certainly the most realistic: it acknowledges the impossibility of a direct opposition to platform monopolies, just as it inherits the failures of trying to repurpose mainstream corporate media in the previous decade. But where does it leave the emancipatory gestures, the utopian acts of worldbuilding, the exhilarated gambles on futurity? Can post-individualist fictioning, weirded narratives, cyber-imaginaries or emancipatory e-deologies still sustain collective horizons? We will ask ourselves how artists and arts practitioners respond to our era of extreme fragmentation, where they organize, what forms these alter-imaginaries can take, and which kind of practices they might produce.
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MA FINE ARTS
by Alessandra Ghiazza
In the empty spaces I find pieces of dreams fields and water, of the forgotten green. A stratification of memories that leads to reveal experiences in natural landscapes, real but also places suspended between memory and the dreamlike, creating through geometric and repetitive shapes a space of contemplation on places, to find them again; postcards of a fragile and continuously changing landscape.
MA FINE ARTS
by Axel Mattart
Tired of Fighting Against Your Brain ?
MA FINE ARTS
by Camila Polania
Some say the body arrives first, and the soul takes longer. This installation begins with that delay, in the tension between presence and absence. Instructions of Rematriation is a video installation projected onto a wind-moved fabric, a surface that never fully settles. In front, white Rimax chairs evoke everyday spaces of waiting across Latin America: porches, patios, sidewalks. The work follows the passing of a single day, tracing the slow return to the body after displacement. Through video, writing, textile, and sound, the installation holds a kind of return, not geopolitical, but personal and ancestral: a political and spiritual reconnection with what was once left behind.
MA FINE ARTS
by Giorgio Cassano
ZONA DI SACRIFICIO is a film study that fuses documentary, ethnography, and poetic montage around the Fiume Tara—Taranto’s revered “miracle river.” Through a tapestry of memories, legends, visions, and personal testimonies, the film explores how this sacred source has sustained local identity and resilience, even as the encroachment of the ILVA steelworks has turned the surrounding landscape into a literal “sacrifice zone.” It is both a visual elegy to a once-pure watercourse and a poignant reflection on environmental violence, tracing the uneasy coexistence of spiritual reverence and industrial devastation in a community striving to reclaim its voice.
MA FINE ARTS
by Ludovico Orombelli
Sinopia is the culmination of a research project carried out at ECAL on the techniques and images that have shaped the Western imaginary. A scene from The "Legend of the True Cross", painted in the 15th century, has been reproduced using the same materials that its author, Piero della Francesca, employed to sketch the preparatory drawing on the wall before completing it in paint. The image thus reappears in its earliest phase, as a ghostly presence that invites us to reflect on the presence and role of the past within our present time.