Upon entering the Futures Digital Festival: The Expos, one is immediately greeted by a black screen with white font directing you to a specific exhibition, just like the directory at a museum. Reset #1 features the work of photographer Ana Zibelnik.

Structured just as a physical exhibition is, there are several ways to enter Reset #1, through different links placed on the page. The prescribed method might be doing things chronologically, by reading top to bottom and clicking the link there, but if you are something of a nonconformist then a museum exhibition is probably not confined by methods of chronology.

Clicking upon Reset #1 brings you to Zibelnik and her exhibition, Immortality Is Commonplace, which features lichens as a “metaphor through which to explore the precariousness of our environmental conditions.” Her work has typically featured the connections between death, immortality, photography, and extinction.

What’s unique about this digital photography exhibition is that each page functions as the artists’ own art gallery. Zibelnik’s room is sepia-toned and features grayscale, presenting photos of preserved flowers and butterflies compared with mountainside and rocks.

She quotes Raph Waldo Emerson in describing the essence of her portfolio, “The slowness of nature which “hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go like rainbows.”

It is the juxtaposition between the small preserved elements of nature and the humongous mountain that shows how everything in nature, from the small to the large, is eternal. The lichens actually grow stronger as they get older, because they so adeptly evolve to fit their environment.

She argues that if these elements last longer than any ephemeral photograph could dream of surviving, then it throws photography philosophy of preserving things for eternity into question.

Salvatore Vitale, host and curator of The Expos, expertly positions the seven main artists, Julie Poly, Ela Polkowska, Eva O'Leary, Garry Loughlin, Sanne De Wilde, Dávid Biró, and Ana Zibelni, in their separate “rooms” for the virtual audience’s enjoyment.

O’Leary holds the honorable slot of Reset #2. Her self-modeled photographs feature her daily quarantine activities with her dog. DIY art projects and photoshoots self-deprecatingly poke fun at the boredom that lockdown brings, yet more seriously, the constant self-checking of one’s temperature feels more depressing than humorous. Constantly looking at one’s phone and staring off into the distance feels more like a product of being along than a part of staged appearances.

Sanne De Wilde and Ela Polkowska, Resets #3 and #6, respectively, were also a part of the festival. In the exhibition, Jailbirds, Wilde depicted the external condition of being human. The monotony of day-to-day life in prison while the coronavirus devastated life outside. One prisoner mentioned how life facing the coronavirus meant everyone now felt as they did, that freedom could easily be taken away.

Polkowska, in contrast, focused on the internal condition of quarantine, in the exhibition Firmly Pinch the Skin Together. Body parts in all different conditions for people to “look”, “touch”, “stretch”, and “balance” were present for audience members to interact with. With this virtual platform, it became all the more important that Polkowska was able to visually convey the feeling of pinching skin, succeeding in this endeavor.

The Futures Digital Festival is running from October 5 to 31 and is more than just a series of exhibition rooms. Co-funded by Creative Europe and designed by Vandejong Creative Agency, the festival brings together artists from all over to participate in five programs: The Expos, The Assembly, The Conversations, The Open Mic, and The Studio Visit. The artists will be participating in self-reflective conversations on the topic of the modern world and photography in general. Feel free to register for any of the various workshops here.

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