TULPA. SALVATION PROTOCOL by Irene Mathilda Alaimo, Luca Campestri, Giacomo Erba, Gabriele Longega, Beatrice Mika Sakaki, curated by Anastasia Pestinova, at Fondazione Spazio Vitale, Verona, January 24, 2026 – February 21, 2026.
Once, someone told us that spirits prefer faulty circuits. That ghosts, when they want to communicate, don’t choose silence, they choose noise: the hiss of a mistuned radio, a file that opens on its own, a blinking LED with no logic behind it. I dismissed it as low-grade superstition, until I stepped into TULPA. SALVATION PROTOCOL.
Here, the issue is no longer where reality ends and art begins, it’s accepting that the boundary has been infected. The works gathered by Anastasia Pestinova don’t illustrate a theme, they embody it, inject it, let it slither through visitors like an elegant, invisible, seductive malware. This exhibition doesn’t speculate on what could happen; it’s already the aftermath of something that did, but no one managed to record. Or worse, was recorded too well.
Fondazione Spazio Vitale has been reformatted into a sacrificial terminal. You don’t enter it, you access it. The space has the clinical sharpness of a server room, yet the emotional temperature of a séance: low, unstable, dense. Lights are precise and piercing, not ambient. Sounds whisper more than they speak. Some rooms appear empty, until you stand still long enough to feel the surfaces vibrating. As if the walls were listening.
The works aren’t exhibited, they’re summoned. The path is erratic, at times recursive, like a software bug returning you to the same point with slight distortions. In one room, Alaimo orchestrates a microcosm of seemingly dead mobile devices, each quietly emitting signals, performing micro-gestures, simulating life. Campestri works with error, not as failure, but as a creative act: his generative videos display warped interfaces, derailed logic, visuals that resemble the dashboards of some algorithmic cult. Longega and Sakaki dive into electronic mythology: plastic, binaural sound, text fragments flashing like coded threats. Erba, finally, weaves a tapestry of input and output in perpetual flux, a terminal showing the present as the leftover of a future already past.
Technically, everything feels fragile. The materials, old hard drives, blackened metal sheets, fractured screens, don’t evoke the future, but what of it has already decayed. The artistic gesture becomes a form of selective decomposition: peeling back the gloss of the digital to reveal the ritual, the spell, the protocol. Because that’s what it’s about, protocols. Not the cold, logical kind of operating systems, but the sacred, compulsive, cyclical kind. Each work unfolds like a corrupted liturgy, repetitions that don’t resolve, but contaminate.
Leaving the exhibition, it feels like a muffled vertigo clings to you, like surfacing from a deep immersion in a place without time. And with it, a quiet question: if every medium is also a medium, how many of our daily gestures are unknowingly rituals of invocation?
-FW
