Valentina Vetturi. La Matematica del Segreto e altre storie

Valentina Vetturi
The Math of the Secret and other stories
Curated by Alessandro Castiglioni

7 October – 3 December 2023

On the occasion of the Nineteenth Contemporary Art Day promoted by AMACI - Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums, La Matematica del Segreto e altri storie, an exhibition and research project by Valentina Vetturi, opens at MA*GA.
Valentina Vetturi's work for MA*GA Museum was born within the three-year program "The Museum in the Post-Digital Era", supported by the Ministry of Culture, Fondo Cultura 2021, and highlights the profound cultural transformations that languages of digital technologies have brought to our society and how the contemporary art museum can become a central place for discussion, narration and education about these universes with which it is important to familiarize ourselves in order to understand our time.
Valentina Vetturi is one of the Italian artists who, in a more complex and articulated way, has carried out research dedicated to the relationship between social, economic, cultural transformations and the web, understood as an immaterial, impalpable and at the same time physical, material infrastructure.
The exhibition is structured through a series of works that allow us to delve deeper and clarify some key words that characterize our digital contemporaneity such as, for example: Hacking, Metaverse, Cryptocurrency, Artificial Intelligence.
At the center of the project is the new production of the artist who gives the exhibition its title: The Math of the Secret. The work takes the form of a series of lecture performances in which human and artificial intelligences dialogue around the theme and history of money. Vetturi invites three scholars: an art historian, Maria Giovanna Mancini, an economic sociologist, Adam Hayes, and a philosopher, Mara Montanaro, to activate reflections on money, its history, its uses, its relationship with power, its non-neutrality with respect to the transformations of our society.
And it places the narratives of these scholars in dialogue with images produced by artificial intelligence, in a series of three video conferences that will alternate in the exhibition.
The Math of the Secret  "looks at money as a relational technology that transforms in space and time depending on its origin, uses, and purposes. The work thus calls into question the orthodox conception that identifies money as a mere instrument of exchange, a neutral veil. Debt, taxes, stones, cryptocurrency, art market, patronage, central banks and decentralized systems, emancipation, gender and class issues are some of the words that make up the score of this work".

During the opening day on Saturday, Oct. 7, the first of three performance-lectures of La Matematica del Segreto will take place starting from the talk by art historian Maria Giovanna Mancini.  At 5 p.m., for this day only, also streamed on the museum's website, a preview of the video will be held, which will then be shown in the exhibition on a loop until to the next date. 

The artistic practice of Valentina Vetturi (1979, lives in Bari, IT) develops between performance, text, sound, sculpture and new media in an authorial discursive space, in which memories and immersive experiences take new shape, as a result of long transdisciplinary research .
Since 2015 he has created a body of works that reflect on digital memory and the digitization of our lives, fueled by research on hacker culture (since 2015) and a Master of Science in Digital Currencies (2019). Among his recent productions Tails (2023), a sculpture in which he stages the infrastructure of the network and its environmental impact, and I Never Think of the Future. It Comes Soon Enough #2 (2021 - ongoing), commissioned by the MAXXI Museum L'Aquila, in which Valentina conceived a "performative landscape" for physical space and metaverse dedicated to the Cypherpunk Mailing List.
Vetturi exhibits and collaborates with institutions in Italy and abroad, including: Spazio Murat, Bari IT (2023); MAXXI L'Aquila IT, Castromediano Museum, Lecce IT (2021), MA*Ga Museum, Gallarate IT; MACTE, Termoli, IT; Teatro Comunale di Bologna, MAMBO, IT (2020); Norrlandsoperan-BildMuseet, Umeå SE; Illuminate Festival, Zug, CH (2018); Zegna Foundation, Trivero, IT (2017); Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome IT; Strauhof, Zurich CH; Italian Cultural Institute, Stockholm SÉ (2016); MACRO, Rome IT (2015); MAXXI Rome; Kunsthalle Göppingen DE; Tranzit.ro, Bucharest RO (2014); Swiss Institute, Rome IT (2013); Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin IT; Viafarini, Milan IT (2012), Santarcangelo Festival, IT (2011).

All images: Courtesy the Artist