The proposal aims to present the results of a one-year research project by curator Arianna Forte, conducted as part of a fellowship with the Italian Council in 2024: Casting a Spell in Computational Regimes: Ritual Practices for a Trans-Feminist Counter-Apocalypse. The project critically reflects on the ongoing cultural and existential transformation, shaped by data and computation, which have redefined our global presence and revealed new forms of domination. Philosopher Franco Berardi describes the current state as a "techno-social dimension of the mind," focusing not on growth but on extinction, anxiety, and degrowth.
The study investigates how these forms of domination are imagined, processed, and resisted, particularly through artistic practices that employ witchcraft and magical thinking to challenge techno-scientific systems. These practices, defined by De Martino as contemporary rituals, function as cultural tools for protection or redemption amid a collapsing universe of meanings. They address the entropic crises present at every level of human experience, including the pervasive digital systems, biomedical engineering, climate collapse, and surveillance regimes of late capitalism.
The research explores artistic practices that create rituals of resistance to computational regimes and informational entropy. Some of these practices can be understood within a common theoretical framework called transfeminist counter-apocalypse: an opposition to apocalyptic rhetoric by embracing precariousness and vulnerability, shared by all living beings, irrespective of gender, race, or intelligence. This concept draws on Johanna Zylinska's alternative narrative to the Anthropocene, reshaping extinction and crisis from a feminist perspective. The project aligns with the theoretical frameworks of Donna Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and Silvia Federici, influential thinkers referenced by many of the artists involved.
Arianna Forte is an independent curator and researcher based in Rome. Her practice explores how contemporary art intersects with science and technology, generating new spaces for critical inquiry and social imagination. Grounded in an intersectional and transfeminist approach, her work focuses on collaborative, performative, and site-specific methodologies that engage non-specialist audiences and diverse communities.
In 2021, she founded ERINNI, a curatorial platform dedicated to exploring the intersections between science, technology, and gender politics, through a feminist and experimental lens.
Her research investigates the political and poetic dimensions of emerging technologies, with a focus on computational rituals, cyber witchcraft, and magical materialism as anti-hegemonic practices of resistance and care. She was awarded the Italian Council Fellowship (12th edition) with the project Casting a spell in computational regimes: ritual practices for a transfeminist counter-apocalypse.
Since 2016, she has been part of the international collective Witches Are Back, which engages with feminist techno-politics and digital disobedience. Arianna often works through non-institutional, experimental formats—such as workshops, public interventions, and temporary gatherings—to reimagine technological agency from below.
She has curated exhibitions and events in Italy and abroad, including SomoS Berlin, la_cápsula (Zurich), Mz Baltazar’s Lab* (Vienna), Romaeuropa Festival, and AlbumArte (Rome).
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