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Chairs, stones and meaningful numerical lists presents a selection of drawings created on various types of carbon paper and then scanned, featuringchairs and stones, complemented by pages of numerical sequences andinteraction marks: the performance scores drawn from the artist's notebook. This graphic series includes recurring figures that evoke the performative practice of Luciano Maggiore, a musician born in Palermo and based in London, whose performances are often reduced to a triad of chair, artist, and discreet electro-acoustic devices. Actions that respond to opaque intentions, hidden within the folds of mathematical scores, showing an occult spirit and almost resembling séances, albeit resolutely anti-spectacular.
Much like these pages, Luciano Maggiore's work is characterized by a specific evocative intensity, capable of sparking speculation despite its direct apparatus, almost literal as this title, hard-edged yet elusive. The remediation process of the drawings, across carbons and lasers, calls to mind several of his records—such as Willy Nilly (Senufo 2014) or Pietra e Oggetto (Koolhas 2020)—where the layering and concretion of sound transform minimal, static sources into environmental resonances. Eerie atmospheres that suggest organic, corporeal, or animal elements, which yet appear to reach us from elsewhere—an aspect playfully inverted, but equally alienating, in the album Very Cheap Non-Human Animal Imitations (Xong 2022).
These soundscapes recall, in keeping with the theme of stones, the Stone Tape Theory—a 19th-century parapsychological idea, recurring in weird literature, which posits that events, emotions, and repressed individual or social memories are imprinted in stones, which transmit them as ghosts and paranormal phenomena. Stones also feature in his recent work 9 pietre, created for Nub’s Licheni platform, revealing a relationship between this figure and the question of spectatorship. Maggiore conducted an experiment with eight participants, who remained still in an empty room for about an hour, to register the equivalent of nine stones positioned in the space. This minimal performance, governed by a principle of absolute stillness—destined to fail—extends to the private listening experience, inviting resonance with this séance. The act of listening inevitably conjures sinister imaginaries, interwoven with relationships of presence and absence, or more precisely, the failure of each. As Mark Fisher describes, the eerie manifests when something is present where there should be nothing [the failure of absence], or when there is nothing present where there should be something [the failure of presence].
A fine, almost ethereal trace, composed of remnants and emanations, evokes the artist’s phantom-like presence, inhabiting chairs like a shadow or specter. The chair often accompanies Luciano Maggiore in his performances, serving as a tool to anchor and tune his stage presence, consistent with his practice of reducing the apparatus to an estranging imaginary. A recent example is N units out of 120, a duet performance where Maggiore, seated opposite an identical empty chair to which is taped a smartphone as speaker, performs a rhythmic score using a dog training clicker. This skeletal execution—evoking the concretism and behaviorism of the event scores by NO PA / PA ON (with Louie Rice)—also hints at the spectacles of 19th-century spiritualism and illusionism. This suggestion is not far-fetched, considering one of Maggiore's early projects, Angstarbeiter (with Ezio Puglia and Dominuqe Vaccaro), which explored the ghost as a scene, across theater and pre-cinema.
Not just chairs and stones, but also meaningful numerical lists… whose meaning remains concealed. Luciano Maggiore’s performances confront the spectator, demanding absolute, almost petrified attention and a concrete presence that is weighed and registered in every facet. At the foundation lies the score apparatus—be it compositional or behavioral—partially revealed in live performance and often resonding to the audience’s presence, or rather, the failure of their absence and incorporeality. Chairs, stones and meaningful numerical lists offers a weird portrait, through symptomatic elements, of Luciano Maggiore’s performative practice, amidst presence and absence, the spectral and the spectatorial—or, to quote Ezio Puglia, a spectrality without ghosts.

A security camera, pointed at the aquarium of a man in Sapporo, Japan. Irene Fenara secretly accesses it from her studio, following a nighttime routine that we discover lasts for many months. She records, through both images and writing, the minimal yet constant transformations of that stream: the fish inhabiting it, the landscape of algae, its light and color variations. But also the life of the man, glimpsed in fleeting moments reflected on the glass. Supervision (Sapporo edition) was born as a video work, a flow of images selected from the long process of capture, which finds a new way of revealing itself in the publication—as an observation journal, the log where the screenshots and annotations have been collected over the months.
Supervision is the title of the broader photographic series that Irene Fenara has been developing since 2018, based on the appropriation of images from surveillance cameras. Through a borderline hacking practice—the artist accesses the cameras without forcing their security—Fenara selects shots from the continuous stream of recordings, saving from the oblivion of automatic deletion images that are constantly generated but rarely, if ever, seen. The series, particularly focused on views of natural and urban landscapes, captures fleeting apparitions such as plays of light and shadow, reflections, and optical phenomena that give rise to dreamlike and fantastic, but also eerie and ghostly images. A poetic system that also includes pixelated textures, chromatic aberrations, blurs, and machine malfunctions. The images traverse visual culture, evoking both artistic references and media—even cyber—aesthetics. Like the Sapporo edition aquarium, which simultaneously recalls a painterly study of light and color, a symbolic figure of a surveilled and simulated reality, and an icon of digital-age since the early-2000s Windows screensavers.
Fenara's practice navigates the complexities of the digital network, slipping into the cracks of computational architectures and revealing a system of hidden or semi-hidden dynamics, which she investigates both visually and systematically. The Supervision photographs are characterized by an oblique, withdrawn perspective on the world, mirroring the positioning of surveillance cameras themselves. Her work inevitably engages with contemporary issues of control, but from a visual cultural standpoint, rather than a social critique. The closed-circuit networks that Fenara opens up are not meant to comment on secrecy or mass surveillance; instead, they belong to a culture where cameras have become an integral part of our daily life. There is no psychology of the artist, no voyeurism, nor an affirmation of critical commentary—rather, a scopic drive to incorporate the machine, unveiling new horizons of the optical unconscious in an era where most images are produced by machines for other machines, beyond human perception, cognition, and agency. This is the (super)vision of a machinic eye that discreetly produces a third nature, in which traditional art-historical and photographic genres—landscape, abstraction, self-portrait—take on new significance, opening up a world beyond the human.
Humans never appear in Supervision; they are an absent subject. Paradoxically, this also applies to the distinct but connected series Portraits from Surveillance Camera, in which Fenara portrays herself by physically entering the surveillance frame and posing for the camera. The artist follows an identical formula for the posture and attire, becoming a cipher, a unit of measurement—when exhibited, the photos vary in format to keep the printed size of her body constant. It is a process of codification of the self, conceptually linked to her photographic practice but also infused with a pop-cultural charge, Matrix-style, like the total-black figure appearing in the frame. In Sapporo edition, the human presence makes an unexpected intrusion, emerging on the screen after many observation sessions, triggering an immediate short circuit despite the minimal manifestations—a hand entering the frame, a sweater draped over a chair—culminating in the spectral epiphany of a reflected face in the aquarium.
Supervision (Sapporo edition) carries its own voyeuristic and reflective temperature, differing from the cooler tone of the Supervision photographic series—already evident in the video and further highlighted by the reading. This journal allows us to follow the process of observation, which begins as a routine expressed in meticulous and repetitive descriptions, almost disturbing for the unwavering attention to the image and its minimal variations. It is a clinical, machinic approach—akin to the image itself—but also deeply personal and intimate, as a near-secret relationship between artist and subject gradually emerges, mirrored by the literary genre of the diary. The writing that informs the images oscillates between analysis and self-referentiality, constructing an emotional landscape—both aquatic and digital—where the artist’s presence, though invisible, becomes palpable. Through the text, we end up encountering imaginative leaps into the lives of the fish and the man, as well as moments of introspection. In those moments, Irene Fenara seems to linger on her own act of observation, discovering herself reflected in that same glass, which becomes screen, mirror, and prism—a projection of presences that find a world within an intricate web of observation and self-observation: between us there are almost twelve thousand kilometers, a lens, a glass, water and another glass.

Una telecamera di sorveglianza, puntata sull’acquario di un uomo di Sapporo, in Giappone. Irene Fenara vi accede segretamente, dal proprio studio, secondo una routine notturna che scopriamo durare molti mesi. Registra, per immagine e scritto, le trasformazioni minime ma costanti di quello stream: i pesci che lo abitano, il paesaggio di alghe, i cambiamenti di luce e colore. Ma anche la vita dell’uomo, di cui coglie brevi attimi riflessi sul vetro. Supervision (Sapporo edition) nasce come opera video, un flusso di immagini selezionate dal lungo processo di cattura, che trova nella pubblicazione nuovo modo di svelarsi, come quaderno di osservazione: il log dove nei mesi sono stati raccolti screenshot e annotazioni.
Supervision è il titolo della più ampia serie fotografica che Irene Fenara sviluppa dal 2018 a partire dall’appropriazione di immagini tratte da telecamere di sorveglianza. Attraverso una pratica di hacking borderline – l’artista accede alla videocamera senza però forzarne la sicurezza – Fenara seleziona gli scatti dal flusso di registrazione, salvando dall’oblio della cancellazione automatica immagini che vengono costantemente generate ma raramente, o mai, viste. Nella serie, incentrata in particolare su visioni di paesaggi naturali e urbani, coglie apparizioni estemporanee, come giochi di luce o di oscurità, riflessi, ombre e fenomeni ottici, che possono dare vita a immagini oniriche, fantastiche, ma anche stranianti e spettrali. Un sistema poetico in cui rientrano anche trame di pixel, aberrazioni cromatiche, sfocature e malfunzionamenti delle macchine. Sono immagini che attraversano la cultura visiva, da suggestioni storico-artistiche a immaginari mediali, perfino cyber, come l’acquario di Sapporo edition, allo stesso tempo un oggetto di studio quasi pittorico su luce e colore, una figura simbolica di una realtà sorvegliata e simulata, un’immagine iconica dell’età digitale sin dagli screensaver windows dei primi anni zero.
La pratica di Fenara si districa nei complessi della rete, inserendosi nelle crepe delle architetture informatiche e manifestando un sistema di dinamiche nascoste o seminascoste, della quale indaga aspetti visuali e sistemici. Le fotografie di Supervision sono caratterizzate da un punto di vista obliquo sul mondo, ritirato, come la posizione delle stesse videocamere. La sua opera implica inevitabilmente la questione contemporanea del controllo, la supervisione, operando però da una prospettiva visuale, anziché da una posizione di commento al sociale. I circuiti chiusi che vengono aperti da Fenara non sono diretti a commentare segretezza e sorveglianza di massa, si tratta delle telecamere ormai entrate nella nostra cultura e che intersecano una geografia del quotidiano. Non troviamo né la psicologia dell’artista, il suo vouyerismo, né affermazione e illustrazione critica, piuttosto una spinta scopica a incorporare la macchina, rivelando nuovi orizzonti dell’inconscio ottico, in un tempo in cui la maggior parte delle immagini sono prodotte da macchine per altre macchine, esulando dalla nostra percezione, cognizione, agency. La (super) visione di un occhio macchinico che produce discretamente una natura terza e in cui i generi della storia dell’arte e della fotografia, come il paesaggio, l’astrazione, l’autoritratto, assumono nuovo valore, aprendo a un mondo ulteriore all’umano.
In Supervision non compare mai l’umano, è un soggetto assente. Un aspetto paradossalmente valido anche per la serie, distinta ma connessa, dei Portraits from surveillance camera, in cui Fenara si auto-ritrae, recandosi nel luogo della telecamera e posando a suo favore. Nel compiere l’atto, l’artista segue una formula sempre identica per postura e divisa, facendosi cifra, unità di misura – quando vengono esposte le foto variano di formato per mantenere fisse le dimensioni di stampa del suo corpo. Un’operazione di codifica del sé, che ha una coincidenza concettuale con la pratica fotografica, ma che non è priva anche di carica pop, stile Matrix, proprio come la figura total black che appare nelle inquadrature. In quest’opera, la presenza umana fa un’intrusione imprevista, comparendo nello schermo dopo varie sessioni di osservazione e generando subito un cortocircuito a partire da manifestazioni minime, come l’ingresso nell’inquadratura di una mano, il distinguersi di un maglione appoggiato a una sedia, fino all’epifania di un volto che si riflette spettrale nell’acquario.
Supervision (Sapporo edition) rivela una temperatura vouyeristica e riflessiva propria, rispetto al raffreddamento della serie fotografica Supervision, rintracciabile già nel video e messa in evidenza dalla lettura. In questo quaderno possiamo seguire il processo di osservazione, che appare iniziare come una routine, espressa in descrizioni minuziose e ripetitive, stranianti per la fermezza con cui viene interrogata l’immagine e la sua variazione minima, seppure carica di mondo. Un approccio clinico, macchinico come l’immagine, ma che si rivela anche proprio e intimo, tanto che viene a delinearsi nel tempo un rapporto quasi segreto tra artista e soggetto osservato, confermato dal motivo letterario del diario. La scrittura che informa le immagini si muove tra analisi e autoreferenzialità, quasi a costruire una sorta di paesaggio emotivo, acquatico e informatico, dal quale emerge la presenza invisibile ma palpabile dell’artista. Nella lettura scopriamo infatti slanci di immaginazione sulla vita dei pesci e dell'uomo, fino a momenti ancora più introspettivi, in cui Irene Fenara appare soffermarsi sul proprio atto e scoprirsi riflessa in quello stesso vetro, che si fa schermo, specchio e prisma, proiezione di presenze che trovano mondo in un intreccio di osservazione e auto-osservazione: tra noi ci sono quasi dodicimila chilometri, una lente, un vetro, acqua e altro vetro.