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words by Giada Olivotto
I got lost. I was looking for the AMANET / EXCHANGE website. I was sure that speaking Italian and having a Hungarian grandmother, I could not be so wrong about a Romanian site. So I managed to guess the first words under DESPRE NOI: We are the leading pawn shop in Romania (...), then I miserably failed, clicking on the wrong pop-up, thus finding myself catapulted to the main page of a newspaper. And here I am, lost, in the meanderings of the web ruled by tyrannical and uncontrollable cookies.
When I think about Stefan’s exhibition in Ancona I think about how I feel right now. Fascinated, I take my hand off the mouse and stand still, watching the reflection of the screen through my glasses. What happens in front of my eyes is a crypto-kaleidoscopic spectacle studded with dances and information traveling at the schizophrenic speed of Just Eat couriers.
Frightened and at the same time fascinated, I leave the page I was browsing
on to indulge in a moment of existential turmoil as I observe random memes. Bewildered, a figure appears before me that seems to have stepped out of the world of 4chan: I feel so vacation today... It seems to pop out of a space- time hole. Its Soviet-like aesthetic may remind us of the statuary of artist Vera Ignat’evna Muchina. The tense body, the mallet ready to strike are yet elements extracted from a digital archive I have memory of. With a Google image search I go back to 2019 when, dragged by an impulse of gentle anarchism, Stefan destroyed the window of Ballostar Mobile. I scroll through the other images that appeared in the search as I think of Stefan, not only an artist but also a courier for Domino’s with an Eastern aesthetic and cultural background and now a precarious worker in Central Europe.