Exhibition of the artworks of the second edition of the Paul Thorel Prize
Alterazioni Video (artist collective: Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Alberto Caffarelli, Matteo Erenbourg, Andrea Masu e Giaocomo Porfiri), Eva & Franco Mattes, Anna Franceschini
Curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini
Organization by Fondazione Paul Thorel in collaborazione con museo Madre
31.05.2025 – 14.07.2025
Fondazione Donnaregina — Napoli, museo Madre, Via Luigi Settembrini 79, 80139 Napoli, Italia
Digital Ghosts is the show of the 2nd edition of the Paul Thorel Prize, a platform for the Italian creative scene that explores digital arts and identifies contemporary imagery as a distinct language of research and aesthetic horizon.
In the exhibition, one encounters icons born to dissolve into the global infosphere—a digital, generative realm that overflows into the analog world, the domain of the material and the tangible. The contamination between online and offline realities reveals a condition increasingly shared by humans, machines, and objects, both new and old actors within the collective imagination. As their presence proliferates across living rooms, shop windows, and screens, they are simultaneously transfigured into digital ghosts, entities suspended in a present that feeds upon—and in many respects converges with—the past.
Digital ghosts do not die, and their traces are not erased. Digital culture scholar Davide Sisto describes a world in which copyright and consent no longer hold sway. We are all, he writes, “permanently available to posterity, and thus accidentally capable of living forever—cumbersome witnesses to the passage of death and the contemporary impossibility of disappearing and of forgetting.”
In Anna Franceschini’s artworks, the sculptural bodies revered by the history of art and architecture, alongside the prosthetic figures of the celebrated Neapolitan nativity scene, no longer function as memento mori—symbols of transience—but instead serve as dynamic mediators of a reciprocity between life and death, grounded in the convergence of ritual, economy, and the humanization of digital experience. The movie, memes and portraits of Alterazioni Video casts light on the writer and performer Filippo Anniballi, who died prematurely, and the lives he never lived. The artist becomes the unwitting revenant of the digital world, amplified by AI and resurrected in a fictional Iceland he had imagined as the setting for his unfinished screenplay. Eva & Franco Mattes expose the viral nature of contemporary imagery. Attached to magnetic boards in hypothetical office spaces—environments where boredom proliferates—are one hundred memes created by anonymous users based on a work by the artists. The image shows Mickey Mouse, innocent yet hegemonic icon of American pop culture, hanged in front of an old television set.
Thus, the immortality imposed by the information society produces a kind of digital purgatory, which materializes in Naples—a city that has historically preserved the mystery of death through the cult of tormented souls, and which projects those who care for them into a suspended bubble of eternity.
