META

Video installation by Enej Gala.
Seven videos for seven screens and their loudspeakers.

"Meta" exihibited in "A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art and Models of Our World", Abbazia di San Gregorio, Venice (May - October 2026).

Sound design: Andrea Gava
Camera: Fabris Šulin
Technical assistance with the marionette: Moe Yoshida

Meta consists of a constellation of monitors displaying a multi-channel video choreography of a marionette made from maps, wandering through a quarry-like landscape. The figure, animated by unseen forces, moves apparently directionless across a terrain stripped of landmarks. The work traces what happens when the framework that organizes perception, the invisible grammar of reality begins to erode. Language becomes texture, image becomes residue, and action no longer guarantees consequence. The puppet’s presence marks this threshold: it performs without a script, articulates without speech, and occupies a world that no longer answers back. In Meta collapse is not a spectacle, but the quiet pulse of the ordinary. In a multitude of monitors, like from an abandoned Media shop, time folds while narrative fragments loop without closure. The installation refuses resolution; instead, it holds the viewer within a state of perceptual uncertainty, a fragile equilibrium where things have not yet disappeared but have ceased to cohere.
The sound in Meta is a collection of radio transmissions from all over the world, coming from human sources, encoded messages, distorted broadcasts, static noise, disturbance and natural phenomena like thunderstorms and their electromagnetic field. The monitors and their internal antennas try to capture these transmissions, in a failing attempt to recollect the leftovers of human technologies made to communicate and shorten distances, only to be left unheard. A machine reproduced texture of sound debris falls into reality as a contrapuntal collapse of the disappearing activities within the non-anthropocentric presence of Meta.
The title carries multiple references: coming from Latin, where it denotes a boundary, turning point, or goal; it also echoes a corporate vision of total mapping. Here it signals both aspiration and irony: movement without arrival, a map without a path. Meta reflects on what remains when direction, purpose, and world-making logics dissolve, leaving only the persistence of motion to search for alternatives.