1+1+1…: Paolo De. ‘The Monarch’s Game’
5 — 20 November 2022
- Artists
- Paolo De
- Curators
- Lesly Fonseca Tundidor
- Venues
- Museo Frederic Marès
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The Monarch’s Game is a collection of animated tales that succeed each other in a series of loops, in which the figure of the monarch (the bird that inspired the Twitter logo) appears trapped in the structures of various automatons. Once and again, it is restricted to the pre-set movement logic of the machines, much like the bird in a cuckoo clock. This mutilated bird within its digital prison is the artist’s way of suggesting the false freedom to which he has been exposed in the network of the Web 3.0 NFT community.
His work, was happily integrated in the cryptographic field under the boom of the promise of freedom of creation and the decentralised nature of the blockchain, has once again been mutilated by censorship. In this case, it is the politicised censorship that singles him out as a public enemy of the United States, under the current sanctions according to which American companies cannot supply goods or services to any users from sanctioned countries (which include Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, Ukraine, and Venezuela).
The Monarch’s Game thus becomes another symptom of the history of endless slavery and censorship of Cuban (artists), both within and without Cuba, at the physical or virtual levels.
Paolo De
1987
PAOLO DE (Cuba, 1987) is a self-taught multimedia artist whose work is indexed on the web based on the nominal identity of the digital platforms he inhabits: Paolo De Insta, Paolo De Yimeil, Paolo De Feisbeul, Paolo de Tuiter, etc. Paolo De focuses on media art, and specifically on trends such as Crypto-Art, Game-Art, Net.Art and Video-Art, and he has covered subjects concerning social networks and their influence on the dynamics of social relationships, as well as on the dissemination and consumption of information in the modern age, the crypto market and geo-regulated blockchain technology, spaces of censorship and the false decentralisation policies of online communities, the internet as an architecture of power, manipulation, and a surveillance centre, digital identity, and interaction and discursive narratives in modern video games, among others. He is deemed to be one of the first NFT artists in Cuba.
Lesly Fonseca Tundidor
Curadora, crítica de arte e investigadora tecnocultural. MA en Comisariado de Arte Digital (ESDi) de la Universidad Ramón Llull de Barcelona. Lic. en Historia del Arte (Universidad de La Habana, Facultad de Artes y Letras). Sus investigaciones se han enfocado al campo de los “new media”, específicamente los Game-Studies. Ha impartido conferencias sobre videoarte, en espacios como: Talleres de Verano en Pérez Art Museum (PAAM) en Miami; Conversando sobre Arte Contemporáneo, de la crítica de videoarte Magali Espinosa; en Charlas Continuas en Galería Continua; en Galería Factoría Habana; en Asimtria (Festival de Sonido y Video experimental) en Perú; durante los Festivales Art Comic del Consejo de las Artes Plásticas de Camagüey; en GAIA 2021 (Game Arts International Assembly); Festival Toda la Teoría del Universo 2021 (Chile). Textos suyos se pueden encontrar en El Oficio (Revista cubana de arte); Art Crónica; ArtonCuba y en la Antología de Arte Cubano Lenguaje Sucio.