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Tag: Francesco Mariotti

Thinking is a Hybrid Garden: the Mariotti – Luy Archive (1964-2024)

Posted on 2026-03-14

Thinking is a Hybrid Garden: the Mariotti – Luy Archive (1964-2024) showcases six decades of artistic and cultural work by Francesco Mariotti (Bern, Switzerland, 1943) and María Luy (Puerto Maldonado, Peru, 1950), revealing a pioneering body of work that intertwines technology, collectivity, nature, and social commitment. Spread across the galleries of the Museo de Arte de Lima – MALI and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima – MAC Lima, this exhibition provides a comprehensive overview on the Mariotti – Luy Archive, currently on loan to MALI. This archive contains historical documentation (photographs, newspaper clippings, magazines, posters, films, and other materials) spanning from the 1960s to the present, covering key moments in both local and international cultural production. Alongside these documents, numerous artworks trace the trajectory of both artists between Peru and Europe.

The exhibition takes as its point of departure the concept of the hybrid, a central theme in the artistic and cultural production of both artists. For Mariotti, the hybrid is not merely  a mixture of elements, but rather a complex form of existence that integrates seemingly opposing components, such as technology and nature. The concept derives from his installations known as Hybrid Gardens (or Quantum Gardens), in which distinct elements converge. For the artist, the hybrid is linked to plastic, waste, and consumer culture, as well as to magic, poetry, and art. It is both artificial and natural, and both organic and synthetic. In other words, it embodies a practice of resistance and transformation.

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) poses new challenges regarding the relationship between humanity, technology, and nature, this exhibition offers a close look at several pioneering developments in this field. We present works that have never before been  exhibited in Peru, offering  multisensory and luminous experiences. These early projects foreshadow the evolution of artificial intelligences emerging in dialogue with diverse cultural traditions and worldviews, from Dadaism to Amazonian mythologies. The exhibition also highlights cultural management work that has been the driving force behind the prolific creative production of Francesco Mariotti and María Luy.

Co-Curated with Miguel A. López

Electro-Poet-Rivelazionaria: Il Salvataggio delle Poesie Computazionali di Gianni Toti – Una conversazione con Francesco Mariotti

Posted on 2025-07-16

In 1985, at the Videoart Festival Locarno, two visionary artists — Italian poet and videomaker Gianni Toti and Swiss-Peruvian artist Francesco Mariotti — created one of the earliest experiments in generative digital poetry in Italy. Using Mariotti’s interactive installation Pappagallo 2, built on a Commodore 64 programmed in BASIC and inspired by the Amazonian mythological figure of the Chullachaqui, they fed Toti’s characteristically inventive, multilingual poems into a machine that randomly recombined them, printed the results on a dot-matrix printer, and even read them aloud in a synthesized voice to a bewildered audience.

What makes this experiment so resonant today is the uncanny parallel between Toti’s own creative practice — his invention of neologisms, his scrambling of linguistic conventions — and what algorithms would later do at scale: as Mariotti put it, Toti was already doing manually what the computer had only just begun to do. Decades before the debate on AI and creativity, this collaboration in a parrot-shaped sculpture asked questions we are still struggling to answer.


PDF Available (in Italian)

Mariátegui, José-Carlos. 2025. «Electro-Poet-Rivelazionaria: Il Salvataggio Delle Poesie Computazionali di Gianni Toti – Una conversazione con Francesco Mariotti.» In Multiverso Toti 1924-2024. Studi sulla figura e l’opera di Gianni Toti, edited by Giovanni Fontana and Silvia Moretti, 153-165. Roma: Gottifredo Edizioni.