Phantasmagoria Pacis

The artwork is a digital animation created with artificial intelligence and digital painting, accompanied by Bach's music Dona Nobis Pacem. Commissioned in 2024 by the Venice Foundation for Peace Research, the work uses new digital technologies to reflect on the ever-timely theme of peace. The title harks back to 19th-century “phantasmagorias”, suggesting, through a series of animated paintings in an ironic, pop style, a sort of kaleidoscopic journey through the state of the contemporary world. Fasso's work offers no certainties or reassuring conclusions. On the contrary, it leads the gaze through a process of deconstruction, a breakdown of reality that faithfully reflects our contemporary condition. As in the reality we live in, order dissolves in the work: what was once compact fragments, what once seemed clear crumbles. It is a transition from black to white, and not in the sense of purification, but of a loss of definition, of orientation. In this context, the concept of phantasmagoria emerges: a human illusion, a mental stage set designed to make us feel safe within an orderly, linear, and manageable narrative. It is, however, an illusion from which we awaken: the idea of ​​having constructed a coherent, logical world. Then, however, we become aware of the fracture, the division. The deconstruction that the artist stages is not merely formal, but existential: it reminds us that every human construction—social, cultural, political—can collapse when there is a lack of profound agreement between its parts. It is precisely here that the theme of harmony becomes central. It is not nostalgia for a lost order, but the urgent need to rediscover harmony among diversity, as the key to escaping chaos. Art, in this, reveals itself as a form of complex thought: it forces us to look at reality from multiple angles, to coexist with ambiguity, to resist the temptation to simplify. It's a journey into the illusions and disillusions of our time: a time in which the dream of control has given way to the anxiety of fragmentation. But precisely from this anxiety, a new vision can arise. As in music, a new harmony is needed in society too. But for the harmony to be authentic, dissonance must first emerge. This is the challenge: to navigate the crisis not to reconstruct the same, but to imagine the new.