Gabriele Garavaglia

L'Almanach 26 : Gabriele Garavaglia

Gabriele Garavaglia (1981, Vercelli, Italy)

Gabriele Garavaglia was born in 1981 in Vercelli, Italy. He lives and works in Zurich. Following his studies in architecture at the Politecnico of Milan and Bartlett School of Architecture in London, he was enrolled in the Master’s Fine Arts program from 2015 to 2017 at ECAL in Lausanne, where he is currently a guest professor. He has already presented his work at the Consortium Museum, in the group show “They” in 2023. 

In Gabriele Garavaglia’s augmented reality world, we are never far from hallucination, vertigo, or disappearance. Giant Up and Down buttons, an EXIT sign that flickers or fades away, holograms, apparitions of teenagers or zombies, signs that are as elementary as they are synthetic: these are all forms of digital trompe-l’œil that accompany both our everyday lives and our dystopian narratives.

The arrangement of the three works produced specifically for his exhibition at the Consortium Museum transforms the space into a mental landscape built from the logics of interfaces, simulation, and science fiction. Enlarged-scale elements - elevator buttons, sculptural objects - emerge within the space as sudden appearances, suspended between image production and unstable material presence.

The project explores the transition from the digital to the physical through printing processes and materials drawn from design, fashion, and temporary architecture, heightening a deliberate sense of artificiality.

Here, Garavaglia brings together a series of motifs related to control, thresholds, and shifts (up / down / exit), in which functions become ambiguous and sometimes dysfunctional. The exit itself may disappear, systems may malfunction, and signs may turn against their own legibility.

The exhibition is permeated by an oscillation between gravity and absurdity, between dystopian imagery and almost burlesque elements, preventing any stabilization of meaning and keeping the installation in a state of critical fiction.