The Palazzo delle Prigioni is not merely a venue: it is a moral grammar sedimented across centuries, a building that Antonio da Ponte — the same architect behind the Rialto Bridge — designed in the late sixteenth century as an architecture of coercion, containment, and the negation of the body in space. Three centuries of incarceration have left something inside these walls that no exhibition design can ever fully neutralise: a heavy, physical, almost organic silence. And it is precisely into this history-laden void that Li Yi-Fan has chosen to deposit his vision — not to resolve the tension, but to inhabit it, to multiply it, to render it unbearably contemporary.
There is something irreversible in the act of crossing that threshold.
Screen Melancholy receives you with the unsettling ease of something already known, yet no longer recognisable.
On the LED panel, a sixty-minute video unfolds: a digital being — a filmmaker generated by real-time game engines, assembled from cheaply purchased models on e-commerce platforms, its head sutured onto its torso like an anatomical report — conducts a theatre of the absurd in which talking organs perform improvised scripts and virtual actors are moved like marionettes. The irony is cold, not consoling. The narrator describes itself with the ruthless precision of an inventory: an Asian male body, the "Mr Woo" model, purchased for a laughable sum; a grey, hairless head stitched on with surgical sutures. The commodification of bodily identity is not denounced — it is displayed, almost proudly, as if to say that the tragedy lies not in the selling, but in the inability to notice it.
Yet it is within the body of the space itself that the exhibition reaches its most disturbing dimension.
Scattered across the halls of the Palazzo, like wreckage from an anatomical shipwreck, lie the sculptures: enormous 3D-printed hands, feet that seem to have walked there from some impossible elsewhere, a head resting on the floor with the silent weight of something that has ceased to sustain thought, fragments of disarticulated legs and arms punctuating the environment like quotations from a text whose original has been lost. Their dimensions — oversized, excessive, out of scale with the flesh-and-blood visitor — produce not monumentality but estrangement.
One finds oneself small before parts of oneself. This is the Freudian uncanny — the Unheimlich — in its most literal and most merciless form: that which is intimate by definition, one's own body, one's own hands, one's own feet, returned enlarged and decontextualised until it becomes foreign, threatening, almost alien. Familiarity inverts into unease without anything external having changed — only the scale shifts, and with it collapses the certainty of possessing one's own body as one's own. It is a Sartrean vertigo: that of contemplating the other who is you, or of recognising that the body you call yours no longer belongs to you in the way you once believed.
One finds oneself small before parts of oneself. This is the Freudian uncanny — the Unheimlich — in its most literal and most merciless form: that which is intimate by definition, one's own body, one's own hands, one's own feet, returned enlarged and decontextualised until it becomes foreign, threatening, almost alien. Familiarity inverts into unease without anything external having changed — only the scale shifts, and with it collapses the certainty of possessing one's own body as one's own. It is a Sartrean vertigo: that of contemplating the other who is you, or of recognising that the body you call yours no longer belongs to you in the way you once believed.
And then something philosophically devastating occurs: one sits on these sculptures. The gesture is almost automatic, suggested by the space itself, and for precisely this reason it reveals its darker nature. The biological body uses an imitation of the digital body as a seat, in order to watch a screen on which the digital body imitates the biological body. The circle closes upon itself in a groundless loop, an infinite deferral between copy and original in which the original reveals itself, slowly, to be both irreplaceable and irrelevant at once.
The melancholy of the title is not sentimental. It is ontological.
It arises from that condition Heidegger might have called Stimmung — a state of being that precedes thought and envelops it, an atmosphere before it is ever an emotion. The melancholy of the screen is the longing for a presence we never fully possessed: presence to ourselves, presence to the world, the mutual presence between bodies that touch without passing through backlit surfaces. In an age of informational overload and artificial intelligence colonising language, perception, and even pain, Li Yi-Fan offers neither diagnoses nor remedies. He offers something more honest and more demanding: to remain inside the melancholy, to enable it as a cognitive posture, to inhabit it as one inhabits a room centuries old.
The Palazzo delle Prigioni, with its history of shackled bodies, of denied freedom, of existences confined to a space they had not chosen, becomes the perfect objective correlative of the digital age: we too are in some sense imprisoned — not within stone walls, but within walls of pixels, within the soft and pervasive borders of software windows, algorithmic feeds, invisible protocols of control. The difference is that our cells look to us like freedom, and our jailers look to us like tools.
Leaving Screen Melancholy takes a moment. Not out of exhaustion, but out of the need to refocus — not the gaze, but who is gazing. It is the most authentic mark of art that works: to leave the visitor slightly displaced from where they stood before entering. Not redeemed, not healed, not instructed. Only — and perhaps that is already enough — a little less certain of themselves.
An exhibition to be experienced with the full awareness that entering will be easy. Leaving will not. The Palazzo delle Prigioni, with Li Yi-Fan inside, does not let you go. It holds. It envelops. It disturbs with the same aching intensity with which it seduces. This is not an experience one recommends: it is one one compels.
