'Ovunque e sempre proteggimi' is an installation work resulting from an ongoing research focused on folk religious worship and its imagery. The work explores the catholic symbolism of holy cards and ex-votos, a kind of votive artifact crafted to thank a holy subject for granting grace to a devotee. In my native region of Piemonte, North-west Italy, ex-votos often take the shape of paintings representing the subjects during a traumatic event (like natural calamities, work accidents and woundings) and its resolution by intercession of divine forces.
Unlike the majority of Cristian artifacts that were typically commissioned by the clergy or by wealthy devotees, ex-votos were often crafted by non-professional artists on makeshift supports. In opposition to official iconography, these devotional objects usually put the unlucky subjects at the center of the work, leaving the divine force only a marginal role in the image. The focus remains on the pain and struggle that affected the devotees.

The work uses imagery and symbolism coming from this tradition while playing with visions coming from contemporary digital culture. By focusing on the depiction of grace and disgrace, the work reveals the fetishism for suffering present in catholic folk imagination as well as elements of contemporary internet culture like self-hate memes, pain disclosure on social media and climate-anxiety.

The work takes the shape of an installation. A series of UV lamps triggers the glowing property of a series of shrines containing Liquid Crystal Displays. The shrines are modeled and subsequently 3D printed in a UV-sensitive PLA. The displays inserted into the shrines showcase animations based on different iconographic moments. Each screen consists of a low-resolution TFT shield mounted on an Arduino microcontroller. To complete the installation a magnetic speaker and a microcontroller generate a sound landscape.

The work was previously presented at Park, Tilburg during the show Rewriting the Future, at Soup, Rotterdam and Springboard Art Fair.