Among dust, small engines and generative systems, Damiano Tata’s studio reveals an art that grows, listens and archives. From this visit came the interview that follows, a conversation about process, otherness and the life of things.
We met Damiano Tata in his studio in Rome, a place where drawings, fragments of machines and quiet mechanical whispers seemed to coexist naturally. Born in 1997, he moves between visual art and what he calls “occasional composition”, working with painting, algorithms, sound and slow processes that change over time. Over the past years he has taken part in artist residencies, received a number of early awards, and in 2025 opened his first solo exhibition Anche dopo che tutto è finito at Lateral in Rome.
What interests him is not representation in a traditional sense, but the way otherness—human, non-human, historical or imagined—takes form, disappears or resists within contemporary narratives. His works often behave more like organisms than objects: they grow, react, collect traces, sometimes watch us back. This interview was born in that studio, among motors, plaster dust and unfinished ideas.
How would you describe the beginning of your artistic practice and its evolution up to today?
If I think about it, I’m still doing the exact same things I was doing in high school. The difference is that now I do them better—sometimes faster, sometimes slower—but with greater awareness. At a certain point, after producing a large number of paintings—works structured like systems, where every element influences the next—I started to feel a limit. Those games of interaction fascinated me, but they remained confined to the surface of the canvas. I told myself: “They’re beautiful, but if I keep doing this, I’ll keep throwing them in my own face for years.” And that’s exactly what happened, until I decided to stop and try to make more “serious works”, still beginning from painting.
Where, concretely, did you decide to start again?
I thought the best way was to begin with something I didn’t know how to do. I asked myself which type of painting was most foreign to me, and the answer came immediately: fresco. I had absolutely no mastery of it, so I began right there. The work you see comes from that decision.
I only see a white wall.
Yes, a beautiful white wall. But if you get closer, on the brick on the ground you’ll notice a tiny figure, a stalactite —like a little spout—releasing a droplet, and next to it a stalagmite receiving it. It’s an attempt to create a work that isn’t only observed, but grows over time: the CO₂ in the air reacts with the calcium hydroxide on the surface and begins the process of carbonation. It’s slow, invisible but real, and we all participate in it simply by breathing. We are part of it and, at the same time, excluded from it.
You’ve also described this work as an archive. In what sense?
When I started, this obsession with archives didn’t really exist; now it does, and so I can say it: this is an archive. It preserves traces of the people who pass by, of the cigarettes that were smoked here—although today smoking has decreased and the growth of the work has slowed. It’s an involuntary archive, one that builds itself, it’s a” Mnemon, or Griot, it depends”.
What personal or political motivations led you from painting to a more conceptual and process-based practice?
I think it comes from a series of frustrations. Many things irritate me: cars, pollution, certain social behaviors. But I didn’t want my practice to become a manifesto aimed directly at social change. The history of public service announcements and awareness campaigns shows how often that approach fails. I’m more interested in training the mind—mine and that of others—to perceive possibilities, to build relationships with non-human entities. After all, we ourselves are partly non-human: we host a microbiome, invisible presences that inhabit us.
You’ve mentioned a “prototype of the present”. What is it exactly?
Yes. I call it a prototype, a somewhat melancholic one, created in 2023. I’m currently rebuilding it using more advanced materials—wood and hi-tech components. It consists of a pair of small motors and an algorithm I wrote myself, which I called “search and destroy.” It sounds dramatic, but it’s completely harmless: it simply follows heat sources in the room and tries to move towards them. It’s inefficient, useless for any military purpose, and that’s exactly why I enjoyed writing it. The sculpture—openly referencing Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile of Mussolini—is meant to follow the observer as they move. It’s a metaphor for the present: something that keeps following you, whether you want it or not.
You’ve also worked with reproductions of existing objects—for instance, a tropical fruit…
Exactly. Last year, I dedicated myself almost entirely to reproducing real objects. One of them is the fruit of a palm from the Seychelles, an archipelago inhabited from the mid-1700s by a small group of deported individuals—Africans and Malagasy people. This fruit grows only there. Before people knew where it came from, it would appear washed up on shore, floating, and it became an object of speculation—like tulip bulbs—reaching extraordinary prices. Then a french expedition found the island, took a couple dozen of these fruits, and the myth collapsed.
What made you transform this fruit into an artwork?
Because it’s a symbol of a posthumous journey. When the fruit falls into the sea, it begins to decompose from within: it ferments, swells, and resurfaces. But once swollen, it can no longer germinate. It keeps traveling as a dead seed. A useless, fascinating, tragic movement. I was interested in translating that process into sound.
How did you turn a fruit into a musical instrument?
I thought about sonifying the fermentation—that is, using the very mechanism the fruit employs to move. I built internal chambers—sometimes carved directly into the fruit—that function both as communicating vessels and as small whistles. When fermentation produces gas, the air passes through these cavities and generates sound. Some have four openings—four voices—so the sound becomes denser. I’ve been working with generative music for years: a microphone captures the sound, the computer processes it, and it’s reintroduced into space. The work has two possible conditions: it can be set adrift at sea or in a fountain, or left to ferment on land and listened to as it generates music.
You also mentioned a possible “political still life” made of fruits and vegetables. What do you mean?
I’m thinking of juxtaposing this with other fruits, because the plant world contains highly symbolic objects. One day I’d like to create an exhibition made entirely of fruits and vegetables—a kind of political still life. Among these, the most famous fruit of all—and it’s not the apple—is the banana. The banana is humorous, iconic, but also deeply linked to colonial history and extractivism. It makes people laugh because of its shape, its phallic associations, its color, and the cultural overlays attached to it. Yet it is also a symbol of death: think of still life painting, of how fruit is shown at the end of its cycle. Working with the banal is sometimes the best way to say something complex.
In your work there are also pieces you define as “apocryphal”. What does that mean?
I call them apocryphal because they’re marginal works—born from accidents or sudden visions—but they still belong to my practice. For example, years ago I was hit by a car near the EUR district. In the moment of impact I had a vision: the Michelin Man saluting me in a fascist manner. That image became a small work. Similarly, there are these ‘little bees’—tiny figures trying to cross a puddle but failing because they didn’t account for certain variables. These works arise from errors or fleeting observations, yet they reveal larger mechanisms.
At the same time, you worked on a film. What is it about?
It began during an artist residency, from a conversation about the cartoons we grew up with. Specifically Calimero. I discovered that its creator was a Blackshirt, and even the editor of Balilla, a Fascist youth magazine. That struck me: how is it possible that only a few years later, childhood neuromarketing was entrusted to someone involved in fascist propaganda, without anyone questioning it? At that point I knew I had to make a work out of it, it’s titled “Psicostasia”.
And so you wrote a remake of Calimero. How is it structured?
I imagined Calimero waking up in the Egyptian afterlife. At first, he has no form—he is a gaseous entity. Then he condenses, becomes solid, then liquid. He encounters rituals and characters—farm animals dressed as Egyptian deities—which also came from the fact that the residency took place on a farm. Eventually, he is told he must choose: dissolve and return to the whole, or continue in suffering. In the end, he returns to a gaseous state. It’s an open cycle—maybe one day I’ll write a sequel, maybe not.
Is it an actual animated film, or more of a conceptual piece?
It’s not an animated film in the traditional sense. I didn’t have the budget, but more importantly I didn’t want to create something explicit. It’s an “imagined” animation—written so that the viewer has to construct it mentally. This also allowed me to maintain ambiguity and avoid copyright issues.
What is the political or historical core of this work?
It touches on topics rarely confronted: the Togliatti amnesty, how Italy psychologically processed its fascist and colonial past—especially the crimes in the Horn of Africa, which came before the Holocaust. In Europe, the Holocaust is often considered an isolated moral madness, but colonial violence and racism were already there. My work is not a history lesson or propaganda—I’m not interested in explicitly political art because it can become functional and didactic. I prefer to create ambiguous narratives, with multiple layers of meaning.
This seems to connect to sound and the instruments you create. Can you describe one?
For instance, the piano I dismantled and rebuilt. I attached small vibrating motors to the resonanator; the vibrations are amplified by guitar pickups and diffused into space. It’s an instrument, but also a form of testimony to absence. During the first colonial invasions, there were no audio recorders—if you wanted to reproduce a sound, or keep a memory of it, you had only the piano in the room. I wanted to bring that instrument—or rather its possibility—into a contemporary context, as a kind of ghost presence.
And how was this complexity received?
Surprisingly well. Despite the layered and sometimes uncomfortable nature of the work, it was well received. In the end, we even managed to create a small animated film using shadow techniques. It was a way of symbolically closing the circle—without really closing it.
LINK
- Between dust and algorithms. A day with Damiano Tata in his studio - October 24, 2025
- Giuliana Cunéaz: art as an exploration between science and wonder - September 12, 2025
- Beyond the screen: immersion, embodiment, and empathy at Venice Immersive - August 29, 2025
