Alessandro Pigliapoco (b. 2001, Italy) is a visual artist and music curator based in Milan. He graduated in New Technologies for Art from the Brera Academy and is co-founder of Spazio Sintetico, an independent platform dedicated to artistic research and collaborative practices. His work focuses on the layered nature of identity and the body as a sensory device, examining the intersections of memory, language and moving images. Through video, sound and the spoken word, he constructs perceptual environments in which individual experiences overlap with collective imaginaries, addressing the conditions of vulnerability and disorientation that define contemporary life.
There are moments when the body remains present, while the mind seems to have moved elsewhere. Moments when space loses its solidity, time stretches, and everything around us suddenly appears unfamiliar. Alessandro Pigliapoco’s latest body of work occupies this fragile threshold, where perception falters and identity becomes unstable. In the video work La Polvere nelle Tasche (2026), dissociation becomes the focus of an enquiry into the relationship between body, space and perception. It is not approached solely as a negative condition of separation or loss, but as an ambiguous possibility: a defence mechanism, a survival strategy and, at the same time, an alternative means of self-knowledge.
Within a dark, undefined environment, the subject progressively loses their usual points of reference and is forced to rely on other ways of relating to their surroundings. Touch, hearing and balance replace the primacy of sight, transforming disorientation into a renewed sensory experience. The room thus becomes the symbolic site of a suspended reality, permeated by invisible presences and by small yet persistent agents that infiltrate everyday life. Deprived of reliable coordinates, the body oscillates between withdrawal and a state of constant sensory alertness, between absence and an intensified sense of being present.
Here, dissociation manifests itself as an internal rupture, but also as a liminal space in which the subject can temporarily withdraw from external pressures and renegotiate their sense of self. It is not presented solely as an individual experience, however, but also as a lens through which to observe a shared condition. In a contemporary world marked by alienation and isolation, the individual fracture can become a common ground of recognition, while opening up the possibility of new perspectives, horizons of meaning and forms of awareness.
Through a fragmented narrative and suspended images, Pigliapoco constructs an environment in which losing one’s bearings becomes a means of expanding sensory experience. Dematerialisation does not amount to disappearance, but to the search for a different form of presence.
Text by Erica Massaccesi