History unfolds as a non-linear process, rich with bifurcations and untaken paths. Yet we always find ourselves bound to a single trajectory. To tell a story, to weave a conspiracy, is to slip back into those forgotten possibilities, to walk the roads that history left behind.
PROGRAMMA 101 moves between narrative and factuality, uncovering the hidden fragments buried at the origin of the digital present. The work explores the unique experience of Olivetti, the most successful 20th century Italian technological company. An almost utopian model of technical and social development, Olivetti’s experience was rooted in humanistic principles and social solidarity, with its roots in Catholic heresy and anti-fascist resistance. A project that peaked in the early 1960s until a very abrupt ending. Infused with the aesthetics and logic of conspiracy, PROGRAMMA 101 invites viewers to navigate hidden connections and obscured truths about Italy's Cold War trajectory, the influence of the US Empire, and its impact on the current Western technological landscape. Rather than presenting a singular truth, the work engages with an evidentiary paradigm, shifting between absences, suggestions, and fleeting impressions. Its truth is not a whole, but a fragmented mosaic to be reassembled.
Videos facing each other tell the enigmatic story from two differing perspectives, while the terminal receives cryptic messages and prompts from the PROGRAMMA 101 archive. The installation gives hints, interpretations, and further provocations to the visitors in order for them to interpret the story. Rather than presenting a singular truth, the work engages with an evidentiary paradigm, shifting between absences, suggestions, and fleeting impressions. Its truth is not a whole, but a fragmented mosaic to be reassembled.
✹ Main exhibition @ Esoteric Ecotechnics. Irrational Computation and Conspiratorial Networking
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REINCANTAMENTO is a Research and Publishing Group exploring Technology, Radical Imagination and Rituality. Based across Berlin, Venice, Milan and Turin, they run independent publishing practices, develop playful interventions and ritual practices, and host gatherings that rethink our relationship with technology. REINCANTAMENTO channels Mediterranean magical knowledge and speculative hope into experiments with cooperative economics and situated software to create sites of collective inquiry. As a collective force, REINCANTAMENTO refuses the art world's fixation on identity, working instead within wider networks of transformation. For this project, REINCANTAMENTO is Anna Fasolato, Matteo Osio, Kinked, Giorgio Craparo and Alessandro Y. Longo.
