IT, °1993 - Work between Belgium (Antwerp) and Italy. 

davidezulli93@gmail.com
https://www.instagram.com/davidezulli_/

Davide Zulli’s practice, more than focusing on a specific theme, is based on a methodology that uses speculative fiction as a medium to explore the world around him. He creates installations, sculptures, paintings, and drawings using speculative narratives drawn from theory, fiction, cinema, and games culture. These inspirations function as an imaginative framework that Zulli adopts to tackle specific contemporary issues, such as climate crisis, the dichotomy between artificial and natural, and the relation between individual and the surrounding landscape, meant as social construction.

He imagines urban areas as virtual archaeological sites in which Davide Zulli can find important information for the narratives in his works. For this reason, he tries to preserve in his artwork a sense of melancholy and nostalgia, as these emotions are reminiscent of an ancient past that never actually took place. One of the concepts that has influenced Zulli’s practice in this sense is unmonumentality, as described in the exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New Museum, 2007). The show described “the present as an age of crumbling symbols and broken icons,” a feeling that he often tries to present in his narratives.

Many of his works are displayed as artifacts that analyze the balance between spirituality and consumerism in individuals, between the search for symbols and their degradation.

Part of his background is connected to graffiti. Being part of the graffiti community allowed Davide Zulli to observe and explore the city from a totally different perspective, to experience its structures, train stations, and hidden underground networks in a manner that goes beyond passive everyday use, allowing him to see a clear link between the city and the concept of Unmonumentality.

He uses the frictions and dissonances he observes in urban areas as links between the ruins of his time and the fiction he creates. In more recent works, Davide Zulli started to connect certain issues and components in an attempt to write a “new mythology.” As can be seen in Unknown Journeys (VSA Festival 2019), he combines artificial and natural findings with tropes from gaming culture, fantasy novels, and science fiction to produce new myths. This brings to life a layering of different symbols, both real and invented, which provides the viewer with multiple suggestions and creates narratives that appear uncannily familiar yet dismal.

In his latest works the attention In his most recent works, he focuses on how the identification of the individual in the urban landscape, or elsewhere, remains the key to not feeling lost and forgotten.