Stefano Tamburini (Rome, 1955-1986) was a prophetic "media engineer" whose complex graphic production - which ranges from design to music through fashion, publishing and advertising - is reread in light of the concept of acceleration, the founding core of his poetics and crucial theme of the current debate on contemporary issues such as automation, machinic evolution, technological singularity and techno-capitalist utopia/dystopia.

The exhibition, curated in collaboration with Valerio Mattioli, follows the artist's typical attitude to plagiarism and mixing of images: to highlight the transformations of his research it presents a visual apparatus that abandons the concept of originality and the exposure of the fetish through a reworking of his productions in the period between 1980 and 1986.

To expand the concept of acceleration in the wake of Tamburini himself, the exhibition is accompanied by textual contributions commissioned from the philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the theorist Amy Ireland, the DJ and musician Steve Goodman and the designer Silvio Lorusso.

Already the founder of Cannibale, one of the key magazines of the Italian Seventy-seven, Tamburini was first and foremost the iconoclastic soul of Frigidaire, the monthly magazine of customs, politics and comics which, from 1980 onwards, would become the privileged ground for his experiments in the visual field For Frigidaire Tamburini carves out the role of graphic designer, thus defining its characteristic cold and maximalist aesthetic: outlining the iconic zigzag line created with tailoring scissors to give movement and restlessness to the layout, obliquely engraving the color areas , resorting to an impactful typography, conceiving conceptual experiments of meta fashion and xerox art, Tamburini coins a very personal suburban response - cold, surly and forced - to the nascent postmodern imaginary. He prefers theft to citation, the deconstruction of the modern to its detached recovery, the cynical humor of the Roman suburbs where he grew up to the bourgeois irony of the Milan of Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini, of the Memphis group and of Domus magazine. In this key, he explores the possibilities of tools such as the photocopier - with which he creates the Snake Agent stories, manipulating and recombining comics from the 1940s - and the expressiveness of banal materials such as Bristol cardboard.