il papa col strozzapreti

Il Papa Col Strozzapreti explores the ethical and cultural conditions surrounding data extraction in the age of artificial intelligence.

The work centers on a recurring figure: a Pope consuming strozzapreti, a pasta whose name translates to “priest strangler.” This image operates less as narrative and more as a symbolic engine. Authority, appetite, and ritual collapse into a single gesture. The act of consumption becomes a model for how data is gathered, processed, and absorbed into AI systems.

Around this figure, labor persists. Peasants in fields. Hands forming pasta. Repetitive, embodied work. These scenes point to the often invisible human substrate beneath machine intelligence, where cultural production and lived experience are extracted, aggregated, and repurposed without acknowledgment or consent.

The work does not present a clean critique. It operates in a space of tension. The Pope is not only a symbol of power, but of continuity, tradition, and belief. The system he represents is both oppressive and generative. What is being consumed is not just labor, but culture itself.

Formally, the series moves across registers. Classical compositions fracture into surreal distortions. Painterly realism dissolves into abstraction. Images feel partially remembered, partially generated, caught between historical reference and synthetic reconstruction. This instability mirrors the condition of the dataset, where fragments of human expression are recombined into new forms that are legible but displaced.

This is not a story about AI as future. It is about AI as digestion.

Data is not simply collected. It is processed, broken down, and reconstituted. What emerges is something that carries the trace of its source but is no longer accountable to it.

In Il Papa Col Strozzapreti, consumption becomes a metaphor for authorship, and authorship becomes diffuse. The work asks what it means to create in a system built on accumulation, and who remains visible once everything has been absorbed.