Concept
Mindscape invites the visitor to enter a dark environment, where a glowing portal appears embedded in a wall. This portal, made of shards of shattered glass, emits beams of light that stretch into space like guiding lines toward another dimension.
But these rays are not merely pathways to the unknown: they trace luminous perimeters, invisible boundaries reminiscent of the disciplinary architectures described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Cages of light that evoke cells, corridors of control, and internalized surveillance devices. In the dreamlike mist that envelops the space, the environment becomes a shifting diagram of Deleuze’s society of control, where walls disappear, replaced by flows that track and shape behavior in real time.
Through this threshold, luminous geometries and architectures are revealed, continuously reshaping the surrounding space and creating a landscape in constant transformation. A total environment where light and sound merge, projecting the audience into infinite imaginary worlds suspended between the real and the unreal.
Mindscape thus becomes an immersive and cathartic experience, where time crumbles and space dissolves, offering visitors the chance to explore an elsewhere. Yet only by abandoning the mechanisms of mental surveillance—the internalized cages, the invisible grids of light—can one truly cross this threshold.
A rising climax leads those who surrender into an alternate dimension: a meditative state where thought begins to roam freely, escaping the codes of control and following the trail of received impressions. A flight into the freedom of imagination, where each beam becomes a passage and each sound a path out of the prisons of a surveilled identity.
Technical description
Broken mirrors, custom brackets, rgbw laser, audio system, haze
LOCATION
Liminal Space, Rome
YEAR
2025
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).
