Synopsis: EMI is the optimal performance tool. Her sublime productivity is seemingly unbound by basic human needs. EMI is a virtual influencer. EMI eats, EMI secretes, EMI generates.

The project: Embodying the concept of beauty and perfection, EMI is an adored virtual influencer until the day doubt creeps in. What if the trend was to look less and less like a human being? CGI, AI image generators, a program created to automate video processing, but also traditional techniques such as live shooting or FX make-up, EMI explores different methods in an atmosphere of viral vlogs and colorful selfies. EMI is a hybrid project that includes a short film and a web page with NFTs.

https://emi.nevergone.cloud/

The emi.nevergone.cloud webpage is an outgrowth of the EMI film, extending the narrative into another space and time. People can own a part of the influencer’s physical body, thereby becoming the guardian of one of her organs. Each organ comes with a short description that follows the codes of an autopsy. The NFT edition fully embraces the consumerist codes of influencers. Behind its seductive form, the EMI project explores the increasing capitalization of the body, online, inviting us somewhere on the edge of the beautiful and the repulsive, the real and the fictitious, the living and the dead.

Production: Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.

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Created with the support of OOM and based on extensive environmental and anthropogenic datasets provided by universities and the National Research Council (CNR), the installation visualizes exponential curves and hyperbolic graphs that echo the urgent warnings of the UN 2030 Agenda. These escalating data flows lead toward an inevitable tipping point — a moment of singularity beyond which chain reactions become rapid, destructive, and irreversible.

Combining archival footage, statistical visualization, and an immersive soundscape (Escalation Soundscape) composed by the artist under his musical alias Ottodix, the work draws a parallel between environmental degradation and cultural impoverishment. It suggests that the erosion of cultural memory, language complexity, and critical thinking fosters vulnerability to propaganda and intolerance toward complexity itself. Installed in the immersive space of M9 Orizzonti, the ten-minute experience guides viewers through an emotional crescendo that mirrors the accelerating crises shaping our present and near future.

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Dance artist is Alyona Ageeva

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The concept of Backup, a natural progression from that of Habitat, is most closely tied to the 2023 concept album Arca (as Ottodix), which also inspired the artist’s interdisciplinary DVRI residency across Venice. In the album, Zannier envisions a vast space ark—its form recalling both Noah’s Ark and the turtle Chelonia mydas—as humanity’s imagined refuge.

This work acts as a black box containing the DNA of a place: habitat backups stored against catastrophe, seed-capsules designed to be sown elsewhere, enabling future generations to recover the deep essence of a lost landscape—its maps, history, artworks, environmental data, species, and archives.

Zannier’s earlier project ENT, linking environmental data between Italy and six continents, began between Venice and New Zealand and concluded in the United States, entering the collection of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York with the support of international curator and architect Alessandro Melis.

He also collaborates with universities and research institutes worldwide, producing artistic and sound-based investigations into complex systems and the interplay between nature and society. Under his musical alias Ottodix, he has released 8 concept albums, 2 collections, and a biography, a pioneering project in Italian electro-alternative music. Today Ottodix concerts bring science, philosophy, and environmentalism into cultural and museum spaces.

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The motif of flight and relocation between worlds through tunnels, pipes, or wells is familiar both to myth and fairy tale traditions. Yet here, the ability to fly is presented in a different light — more as a disguised play with space, where exit and entrance become almost indistinguishable. The psychological and physical sensations of floating, flying, and weightlessness are intimately tied to the notion of happiness and the concept of love — a culmination embodied in Endless Shell Echo.

Through recognizable symbolic elements, it becomes clear that the journey takes place deep within an underwater world, beginning at the threshold between the unconscious and the dream state, as suggested in the first scene. At each stop along the route stands a magical portal — a kind of checkpoint — and the artist, assuming the guise of various heroines, appears inside, beside, or near these thresholds, poetically “casting spells” to metaphorically inform us where we have arrived and what lies ahead.

Overall, the work reproduces certain ritualistic patterns, most closely resembling initiation rites that evoke the psychological archetype of death and rebirth.

Diana Kapizova offers the viewer ample space for interpretation, aligning herself with a new generation of artists who are deeply peace-oriented and have consciously distanced themselves from traditional critical-artistic paradigms. Endless Shell Echo can be read as a myth of eternal return, a reenactment of the archetypal initiation order, a Platonic allegory of the cave and transcendence of bodily limitations — where desire generates images and images give rise to desire — or as the anguish of the prophet Jonah, “the waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.”

Others might associate the experience with Stanislav Grof’s perinatal matrices, with the myth of Venus born from the sea foam bringing humanity the precious gift of love, or recall the poetic imagery of Mikhail Kuzmin.

Some might interpret the route as a retrospective journey through the bliss of prenatal life, or as a psychoanalytical model of narcissism.

Endless Shell Echo is Kapizova’s expedition into fantastical worlds. The structure of this alternate reality is composed of a sequence of fairy-tale scenes, each unfolding into the next, ultimately culminating in the heroine’s ascent and transition into the otherworld.

– Svetlana Taylor, Independent curator and lecturer

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Riding a winged Pegasus-train, the heroine arrives in her hometown of Pervouralsk — the matrix of Kapizova’s visual language and a key source of her artistic identity. The atmosphere of the work emerges from two intertwined elements: childhood memories of an industrial city and the fantastical transformation of its factories into a magical landscape, where the heroine searches for happiness and a lost paradise. The journey unfolds as a visual narrative, shaped by introspective self-analysis through the phenomenology of childhood.

Drawing on the structure of Vladimir Propp’s folklore theory — crossings, magical helpers and gifts, forests, and animals — Kapizova leads us into her own fairy-tale realm. The industrial sfumato of massive metallurgical plants transforms them into mystical castles reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. The Ural Mountains are reimagined as secret labyrinths, hidden passages within Pavel Bazhov’s “Malachite Casket.”

Kapizova recounts the story of her childhood city with disarming tenderness. She does not distance herself from it, nor does she portray it as a site of social or ecological catastrophe. Instead, she aligns herself with the community — factory workers, hopeful migrants, all those who sought a better life in the Urals. A quiet melancholy underpins the fairy-tale atmosphere, as the heroine’s journey becomes a wandering among the ruins of Soviet dreams. The once-ambitious modernist utopias, suffused with faith in a brighter future, now barely linger, dissolving into a pink and green mist.

The apotheosis of the journey is the dematerialization of a monument — and with it, the disappearance of the historical narratives it embodied. The shadow under which the heroine seeks refuge is not a simple nostalgia for childhood; it is the shadow of history itself, the imprint of a disillusioned past.

Yet hope persists. The heroine carries a talisman — a stone gifted by the Mistress of the Copper Mountain — a key to the future. As she plants it into the ground, a miraculous transformation begins. The vision of a new world emerges in the form of an imaginative architectural structure — part-factory, part-organ — evocative of the visionary designs of Herzog & de Meuron.

Over this reborn world floats the melody of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. Filled with melancholy for an unattainable ideal, the song becomes an anthem of hope. The rising rainbow symbolizes a longing for a better world — a dream both utopian and poignantly real. The past has ended, and the future is yet to begin.

— Svetlana Taylor, Independent exhibition curator and lecturer

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