CONCEPT
BRIXIA is a permanent multimedia journey for the renewed Roman Age section of the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia, commissioned by Fondazione Brescia Musei for the Italian Capital of Culture 2023. Three immersive installations, each with its own language and technology, propose a new form of museum storytelling where history and iconography unfold without explanatory panels or voices, but through direct sensory perception that turns information into emotion and poetry.
Forms and Places of Memory — a mirrored monolith engraved and animated by projections, evoking the civic act of protecting and celebrating the city’s ancient heritage.
The Winged Victory — a central tableau treated with phosphorescent pigment, illuminated by laser and projection to reveal the iconography and technical virtuosity of Brescia’s most iconic Roman statue.
Architecture, Man and Nature — a multi-projection environment connecting past and present, staging the relationship between humans, built space, and landscape.
Conceived as site-specific “media architectures,” BRIXIA synchronizes light, sound, and moving image to make archaeological evidence vibrantly present, transforming classical remains into a living, contemporary experience.
This project was conceived and delivered by the founders of LIMINAL STATE during their previous practice as NONE Collective.
LOCATION
Museo Santa Giulia , Brescia
YEAR
2023
For over a decade, transmedia artists Saverio Villirillo and Gregorio Comandini have been exploring the relationships between humans and machines, producing works ranging from installations, exhibitions, and social practices. After founding NONE collective, the duo of architects and A/V artists continues their investigation into the threshold between perception, consciousness and imagination with artistic practices that induce the audience into a liminal state.
Through the language of new media, the artists aim to guide participants in their works into ecstatic states where the boundary between reality and imagination dissolves. Mental journeys are generated by overstimulated bodily senses, assuming a condition of permanent change between present and future, fiction and reality, possible and impossible.
The liminal state of altered consciousness arises from speculative narratives where the artists activate a liminal rite in which the audience takes on the central role of enchantment generator, thus constituting the fantastical substance, the magical matter that frees itself from a disenchanted world overwhelmed by a cynical realism. The duo defines a transmedial aesthetic characterized by dark environments, where light, video and sound construct cyclic patterns, sudden glimpses, suspensions and hypnotic crescendos that become disruptive energy and lead to an unexpected rupture.
Their installative and performative works resemble collective rituals where participants find themselves in a liminal state on the threshold of consciousness, identity and time, where social constraints can be temporarily dissolved and future perspectives can be questioned. The dissolution of order during liminality creates an ambiguous, fluid, and malleable situation that allows for the establishment of new customs and an individuation process.
Saverio and Gregorio’s works have been exhibited at Light Art Museum (Budapest/HU), Somerset House (London/UK), Fukuoka Science Museum (Fukuoka/JP), Farol Santander (Sao Paulo/BR), GresArt 671 (Bergamo/IT), Design week (Milan/IT), K11 Art Space (Guangzhou/CN), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome/IT).
They designed and realized historical and scientific outreach exhibitions including “Copernicus and the Revolution of the World” at the Archaeological Park of the Colosseum (2023, Rome), “Classico Pop” at the National Roman Museum (2018, Rome), the Italian Museum of Audiovisual and Cinema (2019, Rome), the Roman Museum of Santa Giulia (2023, Brescia).
