Two projects that stem from an artist residency in a place rich in history: Monte Verità (meaning “Mount Truth”). Located on the shores of Lake Maggiore close to the city of Ascona, it is a 321 metres high hill and a cultural historical ensemble in the Swiss canton of Ticino. The place is famous for its past as the experimental site where members of the Lebensreform (artists, writers, dancers, supporters of various alternative movements among which anarchism) tried to develop a model of alternative society at the beginning of the XX century.
Thus Monte Verità can be thought as a “hill of utopia,” that has long inspired individuals and communities to rethink our existence and blur the lines between life and art. Such attitude is perhaps what we need in the present, a time characterized by discontent, economic inequality, and environmental crises. This decade is defined a “decade of deconstruction”, which will profoundly affect our governance, knowledge systems, and infrastructure. We are now more than ever urged to rethink our lives and envision alternatives, supported by new forms of intelligence that collaborate and compete with us in this endeavor. The experiences at Monte Verità serve as a rich anthology of past searches for alternatives.
Our intervention is divided into two parts. The first, After Such a Long Journey, is composed of a meditation featuring a series of Energy Mats with frottages of key energy points on Monte Verità, and a series of AI generated images dealing with artist and thinker Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s meditative drawings.
Winding and Unwinding goes further into the investigation of Fröbe-Kapteyn, founder of Eranos Foundation in the 1930s, an institution near Monte Verità where she pursued a then futuristic vision of transdisciplinary research through the organization of an annual symposium taking place on the shores of Lake Maggiore. Winding and Unwinding refers to the movement of thought when set in motion and consists of a multimedia installation based on a neural network producing virtual entities involved in an infinite conversation about the topics investigated by Eranos Foundation in its activity.

The works have been produced thanks to the support of MBAL Le Locle and Monte Verità.