Lost in a garden of clouds

AMRO20 exhibition was transformed into a journey through artistic projects dealing with the festival topic "Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes". As the festival became "radically digital", these projects were kind of lost in a garden of clouds. That became the title of the show.

Exhibition design curated by artist duo Sai Bao and Yang Mu.

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Lost in a garden of clouds is a virtual exhibition that extends the digital program of AMRO20 “Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes”. As the festival moved online, also the planned show had to be made accessible remotely and this initiated an exciting process of transformation for both the exhibition format and many of the artworks in it.

We like to call it a virtual show, rather than an online exhibition. This because of the charming qualities that the term ‘virtual’ carries, that is the “being existing in essence, not in fact”. This understanding of virtuality supports the view of the exhibition as something that binds together all the works into a form of narration which happening also in the mind of the viewer. This is what the exhibition designers, the artist duo Sai Bao and Yang Mu, aimed at creating for the spectator: a clickable narrative accompanies the viewer into a realm of cloudy interfaces, a labyrinth of online spaces divided in landscape areas. There is no unique and predefined journey, but a rather open narrative between two dimensional and three dimensional spaces at the borders of the web that one can get lost into and find itself again.

The show was initially planned for a physical space and had to be moved, taking maybe another shape and materiality, but keeping its essence and topics. The works featured here engage with aspects of the climate emergency and its negationism, with the places where natural or urban ecosystems connect with the digital ones and with the exploitation of natural resources and chemical pollution.

Some works were born outside the web and had to be transformed to fit the new environment, some other undertake a multilayered transformation due to their mixed networked-yet-physical nature.

All this works as both an independent narrative with an own logic and as a complementary space to the other festival formats. This two natures merge in the digital social space in Mozilla Hubs, which is thought as a place of encounter and exchange between both festival and exhibition.