Francesco Jodice’s maxi urban installation in Modena

Starting tomorrow, April 20th, the new work by Francesco Jodice, with the provocative and confident title of Save Your Selfie, will be visible on the large façade of the AGO Modena Fabbriche Culturali cultural center. The Modena installation, of sure visual impact, represents the conclusion of a broader project that began in September 2023, when, during a dedicated workshop, the artist and fifteen teenage participants brought the works to life: the selfies of the boys and of the girls were then reworked by the participants with the help of Artificial Intelligence experts and Jodice himself, to transform them into virtual reality scenarios, revealing the imaginaries of the new generations. PHOTOGRAPHY AND AI TO TELL THE DREAMS OF YOUNG PEOPLE The images created through The interaction with the artist and the use of AI make the installation a useful tool for exploring the self-representation of today’s young people: starting from a language particularly widespread among adolescents, that of digital photography, and lowering it through the ‘artificial intelligence in virtual scenarios, such as a post-atomic city or a comic book, the artistic experience has captured the desires, fears and perspectives of the new generations, creating a dialogue between the individual and technology. The work of these months has thus given life, in the words of Jodice himself, to “a reductio ad unum of a generational auto-biography, not only because the individuals (self)-portraits are young inhabitants of the city of Modena, but above all because the backgrounds, the places that the children have decided to ‘inhabit’ in these images, are the fruit of their narrated imagination”.THE STAGES OF JODICE’S ARTISTIC PROJECT IN MODENAThe maxi urban installation represents the fifth and final stage of Come and See, the artistic collaboration started in December 2021 by Francesco Jodice and AGO Modena Fabbriche Culturali: born with the idea of ​​enhancing the cultural space of the former Sant’Agostino Hospital Complex, the project was articulated through workshops, exhibitions, installations, always with the precise intention to tell the urban and social fabric that animates the Emilian town. At the end of these two and a half years of work, the Save Your Selfie installation blends reality, imagination and self-awareness, thus exploiting in the best possible way the new possibilities offered by the technological revolution of our time.[Immagine in apertura: Francesco Jodice, Save Your Selfie, Hamza El Maidi, #05, 2024]