claudio tola





selected works


collective/artist-run






info/about






All rights reserved.
Last update: Sept. 2024

Suburban melancholic, digital nihilist, full-time flâneur.
He mostly works with moving images - both digital and analog,
with a speculative and sculptural approach to their making.
Thinks and works in/through/with fragments, loops and layers.
Endlessly edits, writes and draws sparsely.

Combining speculative observation of reality - physical and virtual, public and personal - with a hunting-and-gathering of found visual materials and a studio-based editing practice - where meaning is made through formal transformations of those materials, his works come into being through a rarefied yet dense language that draws from conceptual art and structural film. Be it moving image installations or single-screen videos, they are built as minimal yet complex, multi-faceted montages whose form is - at all scales - always essential to the content of the work.

His recent practice, through moving images, speculative research, fragmented writing, installation displays, addresses the ontology and technics of representation, vision and visibility. It questions the conditions of possibility and fields of existence of images by constantly exploring their limits, lingering on thresholds, edges and moments of failures. Spanning from art history to contemporary imaging technologies, he is ultimately interested in the deeply human desire to make sense of the world by making images of it - grasping it by encasing it in grids, frames, screens. He unveils tensions and technologies involved in their production, circulation and consumption, and challenges their expected representational value by exposing their opaque, artificial nature.

Through simple, subversive acts of appropriation, un-making, re-staging, and minimal displays, he reflects on the current state of omnipresence of images, screens and technological gazes, exploring how such visual infrastructure and our experience of reality are related.  Often focusing on extreme, paradoxical case-studies and personal drives, he questions embedded power and epistemological dynamics inherent to images and their making, addressing their duality as sources of wonder/spectacle and tools of knowledge/control.

He holds a MFAD in Lens-based Media (2024, Piet Zwart Institute, NL), a MA in Visual Arts (2022, IUAV, IT) and a BA in Architecture (2019, Politecnico di Torino, IT and ENSAPLV, FR). His work has been shown in The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and France. He engages in collective initiatives such as AUGE! (2021-22, Venice, IT), Filmwerkplaats (artist-run film lab, Rotterdam, NL) and VLAK / smallbuttall (artist-run project space, Rotterdam, NL).