Davide_Fontana / Works

A place where relics of the digital age come to strand. A collection of internet-found objects. They are illusions, ghosts of an original, their purpose is unspecified, their history forgotten.

ISLAND OF LOST AND FOUND was selected for the Premio Nazionale Delle Arti 2024: a selection of the best works by students among every art school in Italy.
Displayed in Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania (18.10 - 15.12.2024)

This island doesn't exist, its inhabitants are places, objects, people that have been scanned through the technique of photogrammetry and then shared on the internet. These artefacts are not natives to this digital space, they don't belong here and the glitches in the 3D-model testify that. They once were real and they probably had many stories to tell, but what you finnd on the island is just a copy, one of many clones of which traces have been lost. Theey are like ghosts, illusions, in some cases their appearance is so distorted you can barely tell what they are supposed to be.

Just like artist-collectors Louise Nevelson and Joseph Cornell's work, this island is made up of found objects, decontextualized and repurposed, arranged inside a box. If the objects in Cornell’s boxes are found in thrift stores or by the side of the street, the ones on this island are stumbled upon browsing the internet, in the “sort-by-newest” tab or among the last pages of sites like Sketchfab.com. There's a familiar aspect to them, their jagged look gives a sense of warmth like the grain of 35mm or the crackling of a vinyl.