Project Room #1 | Andrea Cozzi, Stefano Cozzi e Marie Janssen. La matrice di tutti i segreti

In 2010, the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, thanks to the Main Sponsor Unicredit, dedicated an area of its exhibition space at Via Solari 35 – called Project Room – to the creation of projects conceived by young artists. Today, this experience is reborn in a new form: no longer a specifically reserved physical space, but a proposal for sharing. With the Project Room, in fact, in addition to its exhibition space, the Foundation intends to offer its multi-year experience to artists under 30, to support them in the realization of their artistic projects and guide them toward the maturation of formal research and cultural reflection contained in their work.

The Project Room is above all a bet on the potential arising from the contamination between new ideas and consolidated expertise, an experimental initiative that is not seen as a final destination but, rather, as a stage in a journey the Foundation intends to take together with its young guests. On the occasion of each Project Room, the Foundation will offer the opportunity to participate in in-depth meetings and, thanks to educational activities curated by Franca Zuccoli and Chiara Monetti, will also give children the chance to venture into the discovery of contemporary art.

For the first event of the new Project Room cycle, curated by Federico Giani, Andrea Cozzi (1989), Stefano Cozzi (1989), and Marie Janssen (1988) present The Matrix of All Secrets, an installation where the interference between ancient images and futuristic visions illuminate and problematize the current conception of the relationship between man and reality. The three artists attempt to disarm the automatisms of the social media era – where everything is within reach of a smartphone – starting from the most disparate cues: a Greek myth in which the most excruciating pain can only be represented by a veiled face, a German proverb suggesting to "tell secrets to the stove" to bypass oaths, a work by Marcel Duchamp in which the flames of a brazier try in vain to reach 1200 sacks of coal suspended from the ceiling of a room, a warning by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek regarding the threat of things we don’t know we know.

Carbon and silicon ingots, metal cages and insulating panels, a ceramic stove and fictitious archaeological artifacts are the elements that make up an environment – created also with the collaboration of the Massimodeluca Gallery – capable of questioning the visitor about how technological innovation, the immediacy of communication, the accessibility of information, and the controversial relationship between privacy and transparency affect our ability to know and interpret the world.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a brief text by the curator and exclusive editorial content by Caterina Paganini.