During the COVID-19 lockdown, Italian squares, usually dense with movement, noise, and social ritual, suddenly became silent and almost empty. Life had retreated indoors, hidden behind the facades of the buildings that surround these public spaces with such calm architectural order. What had once been feverish and ordinary became fragile, intermittent, almost unreal: a police van crossing the frame, a seagull in flight, a flag moving in the wind, a bicycle, a masked couple walking a dog.
 

Those rare solitary figures moving through the confined city began to feel like narrative fragments from a dystopian film. I started observing them obsessively through the dense network of tourist and surveillance webcams that, accessible online, overlook squares and streets throughout Italy.
 

Locked inside my studio, I found a strange form of relief in looking “outside,” into those airy, sunlit piazzas, the very places where, under normal circumstances, I might have had an aperitivo or dinner. Through the screen, these spaces became both distant and painfully intimate. At some point, I began projecting the webcam images onto the wall of my room, building a new kind of panopticon shaped by the discomfort and psychic tension of quarantine.
 

As an artist working with live media and interaction design, I then decided to take the process further. Using motion-tracking technology, I captured the webcam feeds and sent them into a software environment developed specifically for this project. The system recorded and tracked the movement of people, vehicles, and animals, transforming that flow of data into a synthetic concert: movements generated sounds, modulations, graphic visualizations, and digital effects.
 

Finally, I sent the transformed material back into the network through a series of live Facebook streams, creating a real-time loop of surveillance, translation, and creative re-interpretation.

​

Shows

SHIFT Biennale, Uk - 2020

Lockdown Diaries online festival - 2020

Quarantine Exhibition @ Space52, Athens - 2020

'Chaos and Cosmos' @ CYLAND, Russia - 2020 (1st prize winner)

La Pan Caput, Chile - 2020

Zealous Stories: Digital Art 2020 - 2020 (1st prize winner)

Proyector Festival, Madrid - 2020
WRO Media Art Biennale 'Reverso', Poland - 2021

ADD + ART Conference, Barcelona - 2021
 

Credits
Concept, art direction, animation, editing - Francesca Fini

​

Media

Full performance during first national Lockdown - open link
Live performance for Lockdown Diaries - open link

Interview for Zealous Stories - open link