The project belongs to a phase in the artists’ collaboration when they worked under the pseudonym ‘The Grossi Maglioni Magic Duo’, and it engages with the realm of magic as a conceptual and performative framework, focusing on the threshold between reality and fiction, the visible and the unseen. Drawing on the vocabulary and semiotics of stage magic, illusionism and the grotesque, the artists embodied a series of roles traditionally linked to the magical realm – distinctly gendered figures such as the medium, the magician’s assistant, or the conjurer – to investigate how perception, ambiguity, and the body can become vehicles for accessing altered states of consciousness and new modes of understanding. At the same time, the work reflects on the interplay between the actual and the virtual, on how an action, physically rooted in one space, might generate consequences elsewhere, unseen yet tangible. This spatial and temporal displacement becomes a central strategy in the duo’s practice, suggesting a kind of expanded choreography of presence. The interest in virtuality also gestures toward the connection between magic and science, as it materialises in both emerging technologies and quantum physics, bridging domains often considered fundamentally at odds. In addition to the element of disguise, the artists deployed a variety of props, including the spirit cabinet, the dematerialising machine, and the Ouija board, experimenting with devices and systems of interaction. Integral to the project is an investigation into the practice of art-making itself, along with the relational dynamics formed with audiences through exchange, trust, and the temporary suspension of disbelief. It also examines how this process can be broadened through various forms of presence, absence, and degrees of embodiment. In this context, the artists took on the role of both catalysts and mediums, channelling energies and ideas, and opening a space where meaning emerges through shared attention and suggestion, rather than fixed interpretation.
