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Claudio Tola

video, sculpture, Media, Light, installation, movie,Experimental, D.I.Y, Digital technology, Digital, Audiovisual, Artistic research

Suburban melancholic, digital nihilist, full-time flâneur. Mostly makes images - digital and analog, still and moving - with a speculative and sculptural approach. Thinks and works in/by/with fragments, loops, layers. Endlessly edits, writes and draws sparsely. His recent practice questions material and immaterial stakes of images, representation and visibility, lingering on thresholds, edges and moments of failure. Combining a speculative observation of reality - physical and digital, public and personal - with a hunting-and-gathering of found visual materials and an editing practice in which meaning is made through formal transformations of those materials, his works come into being through a rarefied yet dense language that draws from conceptual art and structural film. Be it installations or single-screen pieces, they are built as minimal yet complex, multi-faceted montages whose form is - at all scales - always essential to the content of the work. Through acts of appropriation, un-making, re-staging, he reflects on the omnipresence of images, screens and technological gazes, exploring how such visual infrastructure and our experience of reality are related. He addresses the ontology and techniques of representation, questioning power and epistemological dynamics that are embedded in images and their making by challenging the expected representational value and exposing their opaque, artificial nature. He holds a Master's degree in Lens-Based Media from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. His work has been shown in The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and France. Born and raised in Torino (IT), lived and studied in Paris (FR) and Venice (IT), he is currently based in Rotterdam (NL). He engages in collective/curatorial/artist-run initiatives, such as BBBLS (upcoming), VLAK - smallbuttall and Filmwerkplaats. A .pdf version of Portfolio, CV and Artist statement can be found on my website.

LTOSLTOSTOLSOTLOS[...] (2025, in progress)
LTOSLTOSTOLSOTLOS[...] (2025, upcoming) - LTOSLTOSTOLSOTLOS[...] is a new installation that will be presented at The Crooked Studio (Rotterdam, NL) in May 2025. It features two new video works and a live sound piece. Here are some preliminary notes about it. 1) On one side of the room, a shiny, bright, LCD screen displays abstract black shapes moving on a white background. The footage is shaky, pixelated, blurry. Letters appear, alternating continuously, one after the other.The letters are four. LTOS TOLS OTLS TLSO At times, the surrounding space is seen. The black frame of a computer monitor, a reflection of the round lens of a camera, glimpses of a bright sky peeking through a window. LOTS SOLT TOSL LOST In this piece, the image of a word - LOST - as originally found by chance while surfing the internet - is blown up on a screen and filmed by the artist with a handheld digital camera. The full word is never seen. The letters, slowly scanned by the camera, are fragmented, mixed, repeated endlessly in an ever-changing loop form, always similar yet never identical. 2) Projected on a floor-to-ceiling screen, opposite to the first work, empty night seascapes appropriated from 24/7 live weather webcams are edited into a meditative, observational compilation film. Long shots, slow pace, painterly qualities. Some shots are still; the only movement is that of flickering, buzzing digital grain. Other cameras move, driven by hidden algorithms, scanning the horizon, zooming in and out. An absurd contemplative quest across sublime, yet eerie landscapes. What are these wandering cameras, lost eyes, looking at, longing for? But also, what am I - are you - staring at these images made by these webcam - looking for? The film hints at staring at the sea/horizon/sky as a primordially human act of seeing and of being the world; the sea and the horizon as “screens”, whose looking at has to do with understanding someone's own position in the world. Referencing a tradition of structural filmmaking through a post-internet, digital aesthetics, it is a reflection on the ever-presence of technological gazes and on production and experience of digital imagery. The infinite open of the seascape against the fractional units of a computer monitor's pixel grid. Together, they form a subtle reflection - both personal, lyrical and, at the same time political- on the existential backlash of digital technologies, screens, imagery consumption and experience.
LTOSLTOSTOLSOTLOS[...] (2025, in progress)
LTOSLTOSTOLSOTLOS[...] (2025, in progress) - Work in progress still
LTOSLTOSTOLSOTLOS[...] (2025, in progress)
LTOSLTOSTOLSOTLOS[...] (2025, in progress) - Work in progress still.
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Ongoing research project, multimedia installation, variable dimensions. Notes on a “desert” island (working title) is an ongoing speculative research project on the - almost - impossible imagery of a small island whose inhabitants have rejected contact with outsiders for centuries, thus making it an almost completely unknown - and unseen - place. While in the media this island is often presented through the superficial cliché of the “desert” island between the sublime and the savage, it becomes in my work a paradoxical case-study to reflect on the epistemological and power dynamics that are inherent to image-making, its ontology and contemporary stakes. Over the past two years I have gathered a heterogeneous archive of the island's attempted representations: from century-old maps to aerial imagery and Google Earth renderings, amateur Youtube videos from airplanes and institutional documentary campaigns. Making images of this island seems to be a mean to get hold of it - grasping it by encasing it in grids, frames, screens - at a distance. Such attempt is almost impossible, yet surprisingly recurring. All of the island's imagery showcase - equally yet in different ways - an abstract nature, apparently raising from the gap between the unattainability of the subject and the materiality of its representations. This peculiar aspect becomes in my work the starting point to reflect on the materiality, fiction and agency of images, challenging their expected representational value by exposing their artifice. Here you can find the documentation of a recent installation set-up of the project. Through gestures of appropriation, un-making, and re-staging of the island's existing imagery, articulating notions of transparency and opacity, visibility and invisibility - both on a political and semiotic level - I am reflecting on how it confronts mankind's image-making obsession with its failure and, at large, addressing the deeply human desire to make sense of the world by making images of it. The - supposed - name of the island is never said, nor the island is ever actually shown in the works. Its imagery and information are always questioned and screened through deliberate choices of opacity and abstraction that transcend any documentary interest in favor of a larger critical reflection on the stakes of their very existence.
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Installation view.
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Name generator for a desert island (prototype) / Generative software, digital video animation, dimensions variable
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Maps (1525-now) / Custom-made lightbox, digital prints on acetate, variable dimensions
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Maps (1525-now) / Custom-made lightbox, digital prints on acetate, variable dimensions
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Self-portrait with the island / Digital video projection on semi-transparent surface, variable dimensions
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Installation view.
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Installation view.
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Flying over footage / Appropriated YouTube footage compilation on modified LCD screen, color, sound, loop
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Threshold (Google Earth) / Digital print on photographic paper, variable dimensions
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Threshold (Google Earth) / Digital print on photographic paper, variable dimensions
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Installation view.
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Arrows / Digital animation of found image, color, sound, loop
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing)
Notes on a desert island (2022-ongoing) - Arrows / Digital animation of found image, color, sound, loop
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES (2024)
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES (2024) - Moving image installation, mixed media, variable dimensions. Installation view. Two cameras chase each other in a deserted, misty landscape, a human figure is sometimes caught in between. A conversation between a father and a son about a genetic disease causing blindness. Lost eyes of classical Greek sculptures caught on analog film and state-of-the-art technologies for retinal implants. BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES articulates in an installation form a reflection on the blurred, multifaceted spaces between vision and blindness, visibility and invisibility, technologies of image-making and experiencing, subtly merging personal, political and formal concerns, lingering on thresholds, interfaces and moments of failure. It displays an overview of the way my practice unfolded in 2022/2023, exploring recurring topics and fields of interests in a fragmented yet complementary way, through a speculative and sculptural approach to making (moving) images. Graduation project from Piet Zwart Institute (Lens-based Media)
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES (2024)
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES (2024) - Installation view.
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES (2024)
BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES (2024) - Installation view.
A choreography for two cameras, a body and a landscape (2024)
A choreography for two cameras, a body and a landscape (2024) - (part of BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES) Digital video, 2-channel projection, dimensions variable 12 minutes, color, sound, loop. On a deserted Dutch beach in the middle of an industrial area, two cameras chase each other in the mist. One is an automated webcam, live-streaming the surrounding landscape 24/7. The other is a cinema camera on a tripod. A human figure appears, sometimes behind one of them, sometimes in front of the other, sometimes caught in-between the two. An absurd quest to see, and to see what? A layered reflection on gaze, visibility, technology, image-making and experience.
A choreography for two cameras, a body and a landscape (2024)
A choreography for two cameras, a body and a landscape (2024)
Glaucoma, they said
Glaucoma, they said - (part of BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES) Digital video on 7'' LCD screen, 9 minutes, color, sound, loop. A blurry text scrolls in front of two blinking eyes. As a dialogue between a son - the artist - and his father, it tells the story of a family's genetic retinal disease and questions the possibility and consequences of losing vision.
Glaucoma, they said
Glaucoma, they said
Sensors I
Sensors I - (part of BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES) 16mm b/w film loop, 16mm film projector on floor, custom-built projection screen on floor and hanger/roller device from ceiling, dimensions and duration variable. Classic Greek sculptures (V sec. BC) would often feature detailed representations of eyes, either by means of miniature paintwork or with inlays crafted with precious materials. This was intended to make the statues look alive, real. Over time, these eyes turned into faded traces, holes, scratches. Shot in the Greek section of the Louvre Museum, this piece is a first attempt at capturing the decay of such realistic depictions of eyes through the material specificities of analog film, crafting a layered reflection on representation and its materiality, and a contemplation of a deeply human relationship between seeing and being.
Sensors I
Sensors I
Sensors I
Sensors I
Sensors II
Sensors II - (part of BLIND SPOTS, LIGHT TRICKS/TRACES, FLASHES AND FAILURES) Digital video on 4'' LCD screen, 1 minute, color, no sound, loop. The NanoRetina NR600 is an experimental device intended to partially restore vision of visually impaired people through its implant in their retinal tissue. It was considered the most advanced example of such vision technologies until the recent discontinuation of its development in late 2023. The video features a simple animation of the only image of NR600 found online questioning its scale and resolution, its materiality and visibility.
Sensors II
Sensors II
Three screens (a study) (2024)
Three screens (a study) (2024) - Moving image installation, mixed media, variable dimensions. Installation view. Three pieces which tentatively question (digital) screens and images as objects, articulating and exposing through their juxtaposition the threshold/tension between their expected representational function and their presentation as material devices, insisting on grids, edges, frames, flatness/depth, positvie/negative, image/object. Three found screens, drawn from the artists' daily practice of observation and then variously manipulated through a studio-based, sculptural and speculative approach, which turns them into ... Made as self-standing studies between 2022 and 2023, together they give shape to a formal self-reflection on the practice of image-making itself - its objects, devices, fields of existence - as well as an urgent speculation on the pervasive yet often overlooked presence of screens and images. https://cldtl.com/three-screens-(a-study)-(2024)
Three screens (a study) (2024)
Three screens (a study) (2024) - Installation view.
Three screens (a study) (2024)
I - (part of Three screens (a study)) Digital video on 7'' LCD screen, dimensions variable, 2 minutes, BW, sound, loop. A still image portraying two large presentation screens in an empty, corporate meeting room is continuously cropped, scaled, inverted, layered. The two screens in the original image are frantically fragmented and multiplied, to the point of becoming an abstract, blinding sequence of flickering white and black squares.
Three screens (a study) (2024)
II - (part of Three screens (a study)) Monochrome print on multiple sheets of A4 gray paper, 149x105x3cm (approx.). An image of a stone paved road in construction found online is enlarged and printed on several sheets of paper, then installed a few centimeters from the floor. A spotlight hangs above it, burning its center into a white halo of reflected light. A fractal superimposition of grids, multiple level of materiality: that of the paved road depicted in the image, that of the pixelated structure brought to sight by the large scale of the print, that of the pattern in which the sheets of paper are arranged, that - coincidental - of the tiled floor of the exhibition space. Screens, screens, screens.
Three screens (a study) (2024)
III - (part of Three screens (a study)) Digital video, 16:9, single-channel projection on 4:3 screen, dimensions and duration variable. The projection screen is an almost full monochrome field. Full white, full black. Only the edges of the projected image - curved by the camera wide-angle lens, exceeding the surface of the screen, distorted on the side walls - reveal the material setting of the video: a nightly walk around a mundane plastic tarp, set in place to hide what's behind it. At each turn, the image is inverted.
A cameraman filming or: FILMING/WATCHING/BURNING (2023)
A cameraman filming or: FILMING/WATCHING/BURNING (2023) - HD video, single channel, black and white, sound, 00:04:48. Found footage of two cameras filming on top of a building in New York somewhere in the 1920s becomes the starting point for an intense, self-reflexive short film addressing the essential actions of filmmaking (filming, watching) and its elements (camera, film, projector, eyes). All footage is from Dutch open archive Open Beelden. https://cldtl.com/a-cameraman-filming-or-filmingwatchingburning-(2023)
fwb
A cameraman filming or: FILMING/WATCHING/BURNING (2023)
fwb
A cameraman filming or: FILMING/WATCHING/BURNING (2023)
Untitled (Blue piece aka BLUE BLUE BLUE BLAH BLAH BLAH) (2023)
Blue piece aka BLUE BLUE BLUE BLAH BLAH BLAH) (2023) - Single channel, HD video, color, sound, 00:11:25. Combining appropriate and original footage with a fragmented script, this piece draws speculative connections between various scientific and technological facts – blue light, blue noise, human retinal structures, archetypal objects of looking, omnipresent LED screens, possible blindness, disrupted circadian rhythms […]. Rather loose yet possibly – literally – eye-opening, this piece is an attempt at questioning the way we see – and stand – in a world full of – blue – images.
mamma
1 or 2 images (some notes on) (2023) - HD video, single channel, color, sound, 00:04:10, variable dimensions. Born as a spin-off work from an ongoing research project around an inaccessible Island and its hardly achievable representation, 1 or 2 images (some notes on) speculatively brings together two very different images - Google Earth Pro's imagery around the Island and a 1953 painting by Mark Rothko, dissecting their materiality, questioning their differences and affinities, and ultimately addressing the deep reasons of mankind's need to make images of the world. https://cldtl.com/1-or-2-images-(some-notes-on)-(2023)
1 or 2 images (some notes on) (2023)
1 or 2 images (some notes on) (2023)
Dubai Device (2021-2022)
Dubai Device (2021-2022) - HD video, single channel, color, sound, 00:49:10, variable dimensions. Dubai Dispositif is an ongoing research project, started in 2021, around the online imagery of Dubai, as depicted in amateur tourist Youtube videos. Speculatively considering Dubai as an extreme case-study of our world, I appropriate, dissect and re-edite hundreds of YouTube videos made by tourists or “digital nomads” in Dubai. In these videos, the spaces of the city - exteriors, interiors - unfold in front of a hundred cameras, through camera lenses, touchscreens, car windows, glass facades. Always different, yet always recurrently similar. By re-working Dubai's imagery - constantly produced and shared online, Dubai Dispositif observes and reflects on the mediated experience of the world through ever-present - yet transparent and thus rarely seen - screens and technological interfaces. It generates speculative fiction from fragments of reality, bringing to sight an underlying dispositif that intertwines architecture, “technologies of the self” and image-making and seems to be shaping a peculiar way of being. Subject of the project is therefore not Dubai itself, but the way its images are made and the experience of reality that they stage. One that is always unnoticedly screened, and that refers not only to Dubai-goers but to a wider state of things in our globalized society, which Dubai Dispositif aims at critically drawing attention to, questioning notions related to architecture, technology, hyper-(self)representation, bodies, capitalism, production and diffusion of online imagery. In 2022, Dubai Dispositif took its first form as a 50-minute, single-screen compilation film in 7 thematic parts. In 2025 it will be re-edited into a printed publication
Dubai Device (2021-2022)
Dubai Device (2021-2022)
Yes we can (2021)
Yes we can (2021) - HD video, two channel, color, sound, 00:14:10, variable dimensions. Through a split-screen editing, Yes we can bring together grand landscapes from amateur movies and impressive explosions recorded for technical purposes, both massively filmed in the US between 1945 and 1975 and remarkably recurring in the open-source Prelinger Archive (archive.org/details/prelinger). A double degree of claiming power violently on the world, first by capturing it on film and then by making it relentlessly collapse. The destruction of the landscape, the destruction of the image. https://cldtl.com/yes-we-can!-(2021)
Yes we can (2021)
Yes we can (2021)

Residency of Reflection

Date:
Location: Hectolitre (Brussels)

4-month research residency program at Hectolitre, Brussels.

https://hectolitre.space

LTOSLTOSTOLSOTLOS[...] solo show

Date:
Location: The Crooked Studio (Rotterdam)

Solo show at The Crooked Studio project space in Rotterdam

https://instagram.com/thecrookedstudio

76x32x32_200x85x360, collective show, VLAK / smallbuttall, Rotterdam (NL)

Date:
Location: VLAK / smallbuttall

76x32x32_200x85x360 or "the largest group show in the smallest art space of the city", collective show at VLAK during Rotterdam Art Week 2025.

Open house expo, De Vlakke Hamer during GRAW 2024

Date:

Open house exhibition during GRAW 2024. Together with: Tessa Langeveld, Vere Kester, Claudio Tola, Hilde Speet, Dakota Havard and Simone Schuffelen.

https://www.grootrotterdamsatelierweekend.nl/en/locations/smallbuttall-de-vlakke-hamer/

VLAK / smallbuttall artist-run project space (2024-ongoing)

Date:
https://instagram.com/vlak.smallbuttall

CURRENTLY, CURRENTLY, CURRENTLY

Date:
Location: V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Ubik
In association with: Piet Zwart Institute, V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Ubik

Final graduation show of the Lens-Based Media Master Program, V2 - Lab for Unstable Media and Ubik, Rotterdam (NL)

https://https://worm.org/production/opening-lens-based-media-graduation-show-2024-currently-currently-currently/

Flying Ideas - Shorts in progress

Date:
Location: WORM

Collective screening of short films in progress.

https://worm.org/production/flying-ideas/

EYE Research Lab, EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam (NL)

Date:
Location: EYE Film Museum

Screening as part of EYE Research Lab Program at EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam (NL)

https://www.eyefilm.nl/whats-on/piet-zwart-institute-a-questionnaire/916277

Master of Arts in Lens-Based Media (Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam)

Date:

Wasteland - Digital Debris

Date:
Location: The Grey Space In The Middle
In association with: Galerie de Jalozie, The Grey Space In The Middle

Digital Debris is a one channel 20-screen video installation comprised of new montages of 'waste' footage. By showing how new edits can place the material in a different context and create new meanings, it forms a re-appreciation of this visual waste material. The 20 screens that simultaneously play the same video input, symbolize the excessive overload of visual content that continues to multiply exponentially and ultimately sediments into archaeological layers of digital debris.

https://galeriedejaloezie.org/en/projecten/wasteland-exhibition-fungus-socialis

“Telefoni di Stato, desidera?”

Date:
Location: DRIN

ARCHIPELAGO - Proiezioni d’archivio

Date:
Location: Spazio Punch

Screening of found footage based video works. Organized by IUAV University.

https://www.facebook.com/events/378987697125278/?acontext=%7B%22action_history%22%3A%22null%22%7D&ref_source=newsfeed&ref_mechanism=feed_attachment&_rdr

OFFSHORE IN VENICE

Date:
Location: Shedhalle

OFFSHORE IN VENICE project (online residency and final exhibition) with artist Cally Spooner at the SHED by Shedhalle, Zurich (CH).

https://shedhalle.ch/en/the_shed/offshore/

Master’s degree in Visual Arts (IUAV University, Venice)

Date:
Location: IUAV University

Bachelor’s degree in Architecture (Politecnico di Torino, ENSA Paris La Villette)

Date:
Location: Politecnico di Torino, ENSA Paris La Villette
This artist has no awards yet.