Sleepless Elysium, The Venice Arsenale, La Tesa, Venice

Inspired by therapeutic art, this exhibition explores a return to the essence of the human being and the quest for inner harmony and stability in the context of ungoing upheavals in which anxiety and uncertainty have become the norm. Since the end of modernism, artistic attempts venturing in irrationality and unconsciousness have pointed to the need for and potential of spiritual liberation. In the 1980s, art theorist Rudolf Arnheim proposed 'art as therapy' as a new development in the democratisation of art. Art as a functional and expressive language has been interpreted in a variety of rituals, and with the web3 and metaverse becoming an irresistible trend, perhaps projects such as techno-shamanism and digital healing, which return to the essential needs of the human being from technicality, are a crucialy needed by the contemporary humans.

The matrix of all ancient primitive memories is now accompanied by a new form of resonance to be passed on to the next generation of digital natives. Karmic convergence no longer relies on the guidance of ancient occult , but on algorithms to compose contemporary destinies. A peculiar syncretism allows people to create a virtual connection. More communities are thus created, and human connections are linked in more subtle ways.

The artists in this exhibition use rational methodologies to respond to irrational realities, turning back towards the spiritual epiphany of nature. The experience of the realities of material life becomes, at some point, a spiritual nostalgia. Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht uses the word Solastalgia, a combination of the Latin word sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), to describe an emotional or existential disturbance caused by environmental change. We are still in the same material world as we were in the past, yet we are unable to feel certain connection. The Chinese poet Yu Jian writes in "Nostalgia", "I can't help but feel the bones of my hometown in the nothingness, like playing the role of the beautiful dead of the past". The drifting memories in the works of the artists selected in this exhibition do not stop at nothingness. Technology gives rise to alienation, but it completes the heterogeneous return to the beautiful bones by its nature, returning to the original resonance and solace. The resonance of the moment from the wilderness and the flood might be able to approach immortality in the algorithm and data, allowing the digital nomad to recall again and again, through the dominant wordlessness of the work of art as a language, a symbol of therapy.