L’UNDICESIMA CASA. First edition of the Paul Thorel Prize

L'undicesima casa is the exhibition of the three winning artists of the first edition of the Paul Thorel Prize, an observatory on the Italian creative scene that explores digital arts and identifies photography as its language of research and aesthetic horizon. The Paul Thorel Prize is awarded annually and consists of a month-long residency at the Foundation's premises in Naples. It reactivates the studio and tools of the artist Paul Thorel (1956-2020) - a pioneer of photography and electronic imaging - with a view to creating a new, unpublished artistic production.

In astrology, the eleventh house is the house of friendships and the strength of the collective, of its ability to make a difference in society. In the exhibition, this takes the form of a journey into the relationships and alliances between bodies, communities and ecosystems; a mixture of the organic and the inanimate, the human and the technological. In the artists' work, the hermetically sealed bubbles of contemporary society burst open, revealing a complex universe of identity, moving between natural, architectural and virtual landscapes. What emerges is a distillate of popular culture and sentiment, which thrives in the shadows formed by traditional media and digital 3.0 culture.

The exhibition begins with the works of Lina Pallotta, who immersed herself in the everyday life of the Neapolitan “femminielli” and offers a collection of portraits and moments of intimacy and struggle for civil rights under the leadership of Loredana Rossi, vice-president of ATN - Associazione Transessuale Napoli. This is followed by the visions of Jim C. Nedd - suspended between dream and crude reality - who photographed a group of young Neapolitans, a social body, in a spontaneous act of communion with a primal nature. Lastly, Clusterduck reconstructs the icons, symbols and instances of internet subcultures, from the era of forums and static pages to that of social media and hyper-sharing controlled by the Silicon Valley multinationals and autocratic governments, in pursuit of freedom and meaning.

Pallotta, Nedd and Clusterduck intercept imaginaries and forms of resistance to the processes of cultural gentrification adopted by the reactionary forces of the real world, now that all this is replicated by artificial intelligences in the digital world, with no room for dissonance.