THELEPATHY〜

Mobile device (2016)

The desire to disappear because you feel unfit or rejected. Our age is strongly characterized by a non-fluid and demanding society linked to the pervasive and widespread perception of crisis. We are connected, without relating with each other, in a state of everyday life emergency. We barely distinguish a normal condition from a state of emergency as the basic steps of a common procedure. Thus leading us to a consequent desire of becoming anonymous and invisible, in the search for an anti-web shelter. From these assumptions, Telepathy project attempts to undermine some mechanisms involved in the perception of communication through the production of a mobile phone deprived from its peculiarities, while leaving intact the materials and commercial structures that made its fortune. Telepathy wants to focus the attention on new forms of dependence linked to network. A way to focus on the relationship between world of images, now emptied from its symbolic function, offering an alternative to the increasing spreading of the need for communication, and at the same time proposing the development of already known forms of communication.

It arrived without circuitry, without ports, without the familiar glow of compliance. A slab of marble, cool and opaque, resting in the palm like an artifact misplaced by time. They called it a device, though it resisted the term. It did not process, it did not compute—it listened. In an age that had exhausted connection through saturation, where signals choked the air and silence became a luxury commodity, this object proposed a regression that felt strangely like progress. No network, no subscription, no traceable exchange. Only proximity, intention, and an unmeasurable threshold of attention.

At first, its use was dismissed as ritualistic nostalgia. Users were instructed to hold it, to wait, to think not in words but in contours—memories without language, desires without syntax. Reports emerged slowly. A mother claimed she had felt her son across an ocean, not as a voice but as a presence pressing gently against her awareness. A stranger described encountering something not entirely human, yet not hostile—an intelligence that did not speak but impressed. Skepticism persisted, as it must. Yet the marble did not argue. It accumulated no data, offered no updates, demanded no belief. It simply remained, an interface with no instructions beyond stillness. There was unease in this. Not the fear of surveillance, but of permeability. If distance could be folded without infrastructure, what else could traverse? The device did not distinguish between the known and the unknown, between the living and whatever might linger at the edges of perception. Communication, once engineered and sanitized, became porous again. And yet, there was a quiet optimism embedded in its weight. A suggestion that connection need not be mediated by systems designed to extract, quantify, or control. That perhaps the oldest medium—attention itself—had not been entirely eroded. The marble did not promise clarity. It offered contact. In a world overdefined by signals, it reintroduced ambiguity as a space of encounter. Not all presences could be named. Not all messages could be decoded. But something passed between distances, undeniable in its subtlety.

Holding it, one sensed not a future reclaimed, but a present slightly displaced—where technology no longer extended the self outward, but drew the world inward, into a shared, uncertain field of awareness.

Ti ricordi quel sogno assurdo che si svolgeva nella metropolitana, in cui, nonostante la distanza fra un vagone e l’altro, riuscivamo a parlare? Ti ricordi quanto fosse grande quel divario? Ecco, non è mai stato un problema. Adesso il peso di tutta quella frattura grava come un’onda di centinaia di migliaia di litri d’acqua salata che ti si abbatte sulla schiena nuda, insieme ai detriti e alla sabbia di un maremoto. Ci sono onde che si espandono e ci raggiungono, pensieri tossici che arrivano a fischiare nel lobo, storture della vita che abbracciamo e derive che riusciamo a sopportare, incredibilmente. Siamo resistenti come una roccia; come un razzo sulla rampa di lancio, siamo il boato e al tempo stesso il ragazzino sotto il tavolo, la nuvola che lascia la collina prima che faccia nero. Se chiudo gli occhi provo a parlarti: che è un bene esistere, e che vale comunque come forma condivisa. I miei muscoli allungano la mano e il mio pensiero raggiunge angoli che non sapevo esistere. Sono frequenza che diventa botanica.

Nesxt Festival,SPAZIO Q35, Torino.