Ovunque e sempre proteggimi is a mixed media installation that stems from an ongoing research into folk religious worship and its visual language, particularly the iconography of holy cards and ex-votos. In my native region of Piemonte, ex-votos often take the form of small paintings depicting traumatic events—natural disasters, work accidents, injuries—alongside their resolution through divine intervention. Unlike official religious imagery, these artifacts were typically created by non-professional artists on improvised supports, placing the suffering subject at the center and relegating divine figures to the margins. They reflect a raw, intimate form of storytelling rooted in pain, gratitude, and survival.
The installation draws from this tradition while weaving in contemporary digital iconographies, such as self-hate memes and emotional disclosures on social media. By juxtaposing historical devotional aesthetics with digital expressions of vulnerability, the work explores how grace and disgrace are visualized across time, and how suffering becomes a site of symbolic and emotional investment.
I am particularly interested in how ex-votos operate within atemporal scenarios—many depict events like natural disasters or personal crises that resonate strongly in today’s age of climate instability and collective precarity. These images, though rooted in specific historical contexts, continue to speak to contemporary anxieties and desires for protection and meaning.

Technically, the installation consists of a series of UV-reactive shrines, each housing a liquid crystal display. The shrines are first modeled digitally and then 3D printed in UV-sensitive PLA, which reacts to the light emitted by UV lamps integrated into the setup. Each display features low-resolution animations based on iconographic moments, rendered on TFT screens controlled by Arduino microcontrollers. The choice to use Arduino as a computing platform is intentional: its limited capacity for image rendering results in a visual language that is rough, pixelated, and unpolished. This aesthetic echoes the naïve spirit of traditional ex-votos, where emotional immediacy often overrides formal refinement. A magnetic speaker, also driven by a microcontroller, generates a layered soundscape that complements the visual rhythm of the piece.
The work reflects a broader interest in how devotional objects and digital artifacts both serve as vessels for emotional memory. Through a combination of digital fabrication, low-tech electronics, and symbolic layering, the installation invites reflection on the persistence of ritual, the aesthetics of suffering, and the ways in which personal and collective pain are mediated through images.
The work was previously presented at Park, Tilburg during the show Rewriting the Future, at Soup, Rotterdam and Springboard Art Fair.