WHAT IS A DIATOM?


Every two breaths, one is due to diatoms: single-celled organisms, algae which live in a house of glass and silicon, phytoplankton at the base of the marine fauna food chain. By inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, diatoms are responsible for 50% of all the oxygen needed for the biochemical balance of the planet. Their skeletons travel from the desert over the transoceanic winds to the Amazon, and once there, they feed and fertilize it. Diatoms are destined to disappear due to acidification and overheating of the oceans with potential catastrophic consequences for the human beings.

The CURATORS MILAN created an immersive empathetic space working on the analogy between the blatant evocation of a ghost by a magician of the late nineteenth century and the evocation of the ghost of diatoms through the evolution of a hologram technique in use in the nineteenth century.

The technique used for the installation is itself a point of balance, in this case not between man and nature but between past and present. On the one hand, the creation of a hologram, an element born through 3D animation, speaks about modernity and the digital. On the other hand, everything acquires an ethereal substance through an ancient technique, that of the "ghost of Pepper", already used by illusionists in the 800. In this case, however, the reflecting surface that projects the image into space is not hidden, but revealed, as a window through which we can see a different reality.