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mesmerica l.n.i.-3*



Fig. #01.  Archival scan of MESMERICA’s Booster Pack, front view and back with its description and silver seal — Rome, 2023.


          MESMERICA L.N.I.-3 — the "Dreams, Memories, Ectoplasms, Tales, Nightmares, Chimeras & Hallucunations-Emitting Machine" — is a collection of trading cards developed in occasion of the III Edition of the 'Lab For New Imaginations': an editorial project curated by Irene Angenica from September to December 2024 in Rome as part of MACRO Museum residency program.

        "The dream machine has broken: Your head is full of images and memories of others. Incomprehensible fragments overlap, nightmares of who-knows-who fill the margins and intertwine with yours. Who wrote down these words that you now hold in your hands? Where do these faceless silhouettes, lost in time, come from? The more you try to remember, the more everything gets mixed up."

          The collection originates from eight individual artist contributions, both visual and textual, which explore different dimensions of dreams. Each booster pack contains five cards that can be exchanged and collected, thus becoming engines of unexpected combinations.




Fig. #02-03.  Archival scan of MESMERICA’s collectible trading cards (one for contributor) / Back view of the cards — Rome, 2023.


          The cards’ subjects come from distant imaginaries, and together they convey the idea of a curious and alienating assemblage, taking as aesthetic and conceptual references the Dadaist collages and assemblages, the microcosms of the 'boîtes-en-valise', or the 'cabinets of curiosities'. The random and composite set of cards present in each pack thus aims to multiply the possibilities of narration and interpretation, in an unpredictable movement of play-thought.


Fig. #04-05.  Detail from ‘Cabinet Of Curiosities’, by Johann Georg Hinz (1666) / Ritratto del Museo di Ferrante Imperato a Napoli  (Dell'historia naturale, Naples 1599).

Fig. #07-08.  Archival scans of the artworks created for the project, displaying altered cinematic stills. — Rome, 2023.

Fig. #07-08.  INCUBO: (1) La Mutazione; (2) L’Ego; (3) Il Banchetto; (4) Il Presagio; (5) Lo Spauracchio. — Rome, 2023.

           In addition to creating the visual design for the project, which was inspired both by the darkness of the night and mesmerism — the act of mechanically inducing dream-like states to the brain — I crafted an individual contribution to the set titled ‘Incubus’, in which I explored the tension between mass media, memory, empty frames and horror with a research across moving pictures. Among the fifteen subjects selected, five stills were finally printed as cards, showcasing faceless versions of their cinematic counterparts. The characters were all erased with white paint and as such became innocuous, mimicking our psyche’s defense mechanisms — just as it happens while waking up from a twisted dream.



Fig. #07-08.  People trading cards from the launch event of MESMERICA at Circolo Kokè in Rome. Photo Credits: Stella Liantonio, 2023.