Be The User of My Interface

Marta Mattioli
Be The User of My Interface

Catinca Tabacaru and eastcontemporary are proud to present Marta Mattioli’s first solo exhibition in Italy, Be the User of My Interface, opening November 5, 2024 in Milan.

By questioning inherent notions that shape human existence, technology, and nature, Marta Mattioli proposes necessary materialities for survival within a realm composed of digital imagery. With a tactile sensitivity to anthropic spaces, Mattioli transforms self-referential impulses into grounds for experimenting with utopian spaces. Her appetite for the transhumanist fluidity of human morphology directs the work towards imagining a possible new corporeality.

The bronze and nickel sculptures stage the metallic consistency of anatomical fragments violently twisted by invisible forces or clenched by contorted chains. The forms are conceived by the artist in the arid interface of 3D processing digital programs as she attempts to express the ephemerality from which humanity is liberated through digital transcendence.

These hybrid bodies – vital human fragments captured within industrial holds – can be perceived as secondary artificial entities whose tissues are freed from vulnerability in time and space. They do not coalesce into a human morphological unit, but are individualized through an already decomposed ontological state. While the sensation of a recognizable anatomy may suggest future unity, its dismemberment, decentralization, and fragmentation promises a type of unity only accessible in the digital realm. Taken together, Mattioli’s arrangement familiarizes the viewer with the new ontological status of the digital object.

The space is now populated by sculptural islands, raised vertically by slim metallic pedestals. Here, the human relationship with technology is cultivated to free the specie from dependence on natural accidents, with the aim of ensuring resource storage and availability. Technology disrupts linear temporality, leading to the formation of time streams that flow differently. By allowing the sculptures to invade space, both vertically and horizontally, the exhibition oscillates between an exploration of time and space, and the interaction between bodies within an infinite multiverse.