Fondazione Prada Explores The Language Of Social Media

Transforming Instagram into a virtual place of social investigation, artistic reflection and intellectual provocation.

In helps us cope, Fondazione Prada decided to launch “Love Stories – A Sentimental Survey by Francesco Vezzoli” — an Instagram series where the artist explores the emotional, psychological and sentimental status of a wide online community through the language of today’s social media.

Curated by Eva Fabbris, the project takes shape takes over Instagram’s communication strategies, using the poll function on stories to encourage the exchange of ideas, visions, impressions of love, identity, body, solitude, belonging, diversity and future. In each story, Instagram users will be invited to choose between two possible options, taking sides in favor of one of the two proposed statements and embracing the simplistic binary logic of surveys. The survey itself will include over 50 questions asked by Francesco Vezzoli and associated with images that create visual shocks and interpretative narratives. 

Franscesco Vezzoli

Each week’s surveys will form a thematic focus freely inspired by an aria from operas by Italian composers such as Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Puccini, Gioacchino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni — an homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini who used this piece as a soundtrack in his 1965 documentary classic Comizi d’amore. At the end of each week, the results will be commented on by personalities of the worlds of culture, art, fashion, cinema, music, television and communication. By using a text, a video or another creative contribution, each of them will try to decode the answers, interpret the participants’ moods and emotions and sketching a partial portrait of a community of people sharing existential feelings uncertainty, suspension and desire to restart in this historical moment.   

Despite the ephemeral and instantaneous nature of the platform, “Love Stories” seeks to transform Instagram into a virtual place of social investigation, artistic reflection and intellectual provocation. The series is slated to launch on May 17, so make sure to follow Fondazione Prada’s Instagram to stay abreast.

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