curated by Gabriele Simongini and Serena Tabacchi

FROM APRIL 5th TO JULY 23rd IN ROME
AT PALAZZO ciPOLLA

Immersive swings, digital Zen philosophy, technology, virtual reality viewers, artificial intelligence, blockchain sculptures, poetry, and generative sounds: from April 5^th  to July 23^rd 2023, the 19^th-century Palazzo Cipolla in Rome, on Via del Corso, will be transformed into an Ipotesi Metaverso (Metaverse Hypothesis). An immersion into the minds of the creators of worlds from the Baroque to date. One of the first international exhibitions that poses questions and forms hypotheses on the technological/existential concept of the metaverse.

This exhibition, which was strongly desired by Prof. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele – President of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale – is the result of his intuition and vision and presents the most avant-garde trends of international Contemporary Art. It is no coincidence that, in 1999, Prof. Emanuele gave life to the exhibition space at Palazzo Cipolla in Rome, which has hosted 59 exhibitions in 24 years, and has personally organized the projects that have ranged from Ancient Art to Contemporary Art, both national and international.
The exhibition is curated by Gabriele Simongini and Serena Tabacchi, promoted by the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale, and envisioned by Poema SpA.

Great artists of the past and present meet on a terrain of imagination with the creation of new spatial/existential dimensions in an exhibition that brings together historical works by Carlo Maratti, Andrea Pozzo, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero, De Pistoris, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurits Cornelis Escher, Victor Vasarely, Ugo Nespolo, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Fiducia, Pier Augusto Breccia, Alfredo Zelli, Cesar Santos, along with site-specific works by some of the most innovative and disruptive digital artists of the Italian and international contemporary scene: Robert Alice, Refik Anadol, Alex Braga, Joshua Chaplin, Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick, Damjanski, Primavera De Filippi, fuse*, Fabio Giampietro with/Paolo Di Griacomo, Krista Kim, Mario Klingemann, Pak, Joe Pease, Federico Solmi, Sasha Stiles, and Pinar Yoldas.

Every room within Palazzo Cipolla will become a world in its own right, where ever-changing rules and spaces will be defined: a special swing will give visitors the sensation of diving into a parallel world, digital images will suddenly take shape in a physical reality, an immersive piece will display “Zen digital philosophy”, a sound-based performance will create a sensory multiplication experience, as you immerse yourself in generative poems, and encounter sculptures built on blockchains and also interactive works that combine biological sciences and digital technologies with the creation of a “second nature”.
“Digital technology, bringing the future into the present, is changing the way we see reality, and intervenes incisively in our daily lives. Even art has conformed to this coexistence between past, present, and future, and one of the last exhibitions I created at Palazzo Cipolla, in order of time, that of Quayola’s, is the demonstration of this,” Prof. Emanuele, President of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro, stated and added: “The new exhibition we are presenting today, entitled Ipotesi Metaverso , allows us – through a dialogue between thirty-two historical and contemporary artists from all around the world – to combine tradition, which remains an essential reference point, and with innovation that advances, with the digital world, through the contribution of new technologies that constitute a revolution, even in the way feelings are manifested, which has always been at the base of every work of art, in any era.”

In order to emphasize that the hypothetical metaverse, a new hypertechnological dimension, must be added to real life without replacing it, paintings and sculptures by artists who have created alternative ‘worlds’ coexist with immersive works, proposing to visitors – who are often called in question as ‘actors’ of the exhibition –  a balanced, although sometimes unsettling, relationship between the ‘physical’ and the ‘digital’. A sort of “laboratory for the future”, which intends to offer visitors an experience that is supposed to be, in some respects, similar to that of years to come, in the coexistence of contemplation and immersion. Analmost simultaneous perception of the material and immaterial, between stability and fluctuation,” the curators, Simongini and Tabacchi, declared.
A multimedia and multisensory itinerary that includes painting, sculpture, engraving, digital art, poetry, music, and artificial intelligence.