Leonardo Gatti: Pizza Planet

Looking through the results of a search for Images on google or clicking on a hashtag, it is evident how the media bombardment of our feeds creates a fictitious stratification of information that leads to an emptying of meaning of the image itself.

As Benjamin describes in his essay The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction -The trace is the appearance of a proximity however distant what it has left behind it may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close it may be to what it is arousing. In the trace we make the thing our own. In the aura it takes hold of us-.

This overlapping of an enormous amount of information, extends the emptying even to the material function of the represented object. Seeing and re-seeing an object countless times, leads to a saturation that induces the user to change the use of the same, in an eternal attempt of renewal.

From object to icon, from icon to spam, from spam to “hide from feed” that marks its definitive disappearance.
So the use becomes rejection, the desirable rejection and the elitist commercial and then all over again and all together. In the midst of this total loss of meaning and use new narratives can be unveiled.

It is in this spirit of unveiling, rather than resolving, that “Pizza Planet” stages ten everyday objects by giving them back in a neutralized version.
Just as in an iconic Pizza the addition of new ingredients generates infinite and disparate variations-including grotesque cultural collisions in its pineapple variant-in the same way, in Pizza Planet the carpet abandons its two-dimensionality to become a window, woodwork, skirting board, saucer, chandelier. In doing so, it forces us to question the ambiguous nature of the real and virtual spaces in which we are immersed.