Stefano Ser Togni Portfolio_2023

SER COMICS SPECULATIONS DRAWING

SER fka Stefano Ser(T) Togni is a cartoonist and multidisciplinary artist that works between the fields of architecture, philosophy and graphics.

Likes: crates, diagramming, abandoned (imaginary) places, blatant eclectic speculation, convoluted phantasies, low-budget experimentation, composition, interfaces. His comics seems pretty influenced by that. In the confusion of the universe all, sometimes things bring him to collaborate with micropublishers and collectives, mimic curatorship for promoting fellow artists and comics, and also occasionally help his friends in some interesting crossmedial art projects.

Features and collaboration with: Lumpen Projects, Wobby Magazine, CTRL Magazine, Bergamo Film Meeting, Casa Hooligan, Giallorenzo + LaTempesta, Dischisotterranei, co_atto.

If you need some more formal presentation of my persona, do not hesitate: run and type stefano.togni@gmail.com and I’ll send you something that will surely be more acceptable.

Also, don’t forget to visit togniser.com to get the latest updates and to follow me on social media like facebook and instagram.

Selected works

Curator of the Comics section of the Bergamo International Film Meeting, 2019-ongoing.

Feature in Wobby Magazine #34, 2023.

Il Tempo è Finito exhibition, curated by Casa Hooligan collective c/o Sonic Belligeranza Megastore Bologna, 2023.

Artwork and visual identity for SUPER SOFT RESET, musical album by Giallorenzo published by La Tempesta Dischi, 2022.

Object Oriented Choreography, performance at Romaeuropa c/o Mattatoio Roma and Triennale Teatro Milano, (collaboration with Francesco Luzzana) 2020-21.

in_festa collective exhibition, curated by co_atto c/o passante Porta Garibaldi Milano, 2021.

Selfpublished book on sandwiches titled “La Tecnica del Tramezzino: Trattato Georomantico intorno all’Etereo Non-dolce”, 2020.

Collaboration with architectural firm Armature Globale, 2019-20.

Selected press

ENG Feature in Standard Deviation Magazine by Lumpen Project , with an interview and in the cover design, 2021.

ENG Mentioned in the top 10 of the Puchi Award prize, with La Tecnica del Tramezzino, 2021.

ENG “Boxes we live in”, newsletter entry hosted by Federico Rebecchini Representations of Architecture, 2021.

ITA Video interview with Fabio Kenobit Bortolotti, 2021.

ITA Critical essay by Marta Sironi about ZZYZX, 2021.

SYBERBERG HALLE, MULTIMEDIA ARCHIVE IN DEMMIN

Collaboration with Armature Globale, 2019

“Halle is a project for german film director Hans Jürgen Syberberg in Demmin, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Halle is an archive, a cinema, a choir and a cafe. [...] Describing the project’s context, the city of Demmin, historical events are associated with a motif of defense and security of the body of architecture. Through Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s work, and his use of digital technologies, technical instruments for design, such as crowd simulation model, become architectural language. (Extract from Valentina Noce Master Thesis “Halle w. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg”.)

Interwoven in these project collages are the marks left by Nazi Germany’s past, reflections on the modern surveillance state, and the distinctly contemporary use of video in the disciplinary apparatuses of institutions.

These themes become the design skeleton of this multipurpose space dedicated to the archives of Hans Jurgen Syberberg, the historical filmmaker of postwar Germany.

Subverting the classic division between monument, ruin and architecture, Syberberg’s Halle is a contemporary ghost that replays the fears of grand narratives without showing uplifting or comforting conclusions.

Hyper-technological facilities offer the highest performance for film production, as well as for the organization of theatrical, cultural and musical events. The envelope recreates a monumental basement, lacking of an upward development and treated with foam to restore a staggered idea of worked stone.

ME, FAMILY: PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG PLANET EXHIBITION DESIGN AT MUDAM LUXEMBOURG Collaboration with Armature Globale, 2019

“Sixty five years after its inaugural presentation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Family of Man is the starting point for a diverse survey encompassing new and recent sculpture, installation, video, photography and performance. Organised by Edward Steichen (b. 1879, Bivange, Luxembourg; d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut), The Family of Man toured to over 150 museums worldwide from 1955 to 1962. The exhibition has been on permanent display at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg since 1994.

In the spirit of Steichen’s radical exhibition, Me, Family will present the work of contemporary artists who work across various media and disciplines, exploring the ways in which humanity seeks to express its diverse and coexistent histories as well as the issues of that society finds itself confronted with today”. (extract from the exhibition’s presskit)

The fractally involute geometries of I.M.Pei’s Mudam are framed by the video formats of the digital devices, constantly observed by visitors through the screens of smartphones.

The installation proposed by Armature Globale is a reflection on how the video content produced inside and outside museums’ walls is enjoyed today.

Trapped in an aseptic cinematic machine, visitors are stunned by the postcinematic galaxy of content reproduced seamlessly, simultaneously and lacking a precise order through which to filter and categorize it.

On a formal level, the playback boxes conceived by the studio stand in opposition to the fractal oddities postmodernism of I.M.Pei’s Mudam.

THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO NEW CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

Installation at Macao Milan, 2018

The site-specific installation was designed in collaboration with members of the Macao collective, following a research that involved several cultural institutions in Milan, including BASE, Fondazione Prada, Fondazione Feltrinelli and Mare Culturale Urbano.

“Who is producing culture in Milan today? What are the models and processes behind the new spaces of cultural production? What does it mean to do social innovation in the cultural sector? Is it possible to produce culture as a common good? A new generation of spaces that aims to make culture the common good through bottom-up activation processes. This new geography overlaps with that of New Cultural Institutions, makes it more complex, and raises questions about the nature and purpose of cultural production. [...] Thus Macao, the meeting place of the two geographies of culture, the established and the establishing, at a very particular moment in its history, becomes for us a privileged observatory on the spaces and patterns of cultural production. [...] How to maintain, in the process of formalization, a horizontal and inclusive management? Through what financial instruments to ensure the economic sustainability of such a structure and of the cultural and social project in the long term? Which architecture can translate the needs and visions of this transformation into space?”

(Azzurra Muzzonigro, “Viaggio attraverso le nuove istituzioni culturali”, https:// www.che-fare.com/attraverso-le-nuove-istituzioni-culturali/ )

Elevation and graphics of stencils and their placement in the inner court of Macao.

The temporary wings set up for the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to New Cultural Institutions” event also served as a support for the projection of video essays reflecting on the identities of the spaces investigated by the research.

in_festa exhibition curated by co_atto

c/o passante Milano Porta Garibaldi, 2021

In the context of in_festa exhibition, I was called by co_atto collective to represent comics, and to do so, I proposed an homage to the classic 4panel strip format.

In a highly structured and composite manner, I wanted to cast small suggestions about travel, life, death, and illness in the form of a visual haiku. I attempted to create an ad hoc strip for quick enjoyment, within the public space, but without leaving out an additional layer of reading accessible only to those who choose to extend their commute by a couple of minutes to read the sentences written in the balloons.

The captions suggest a connection between the space of the passerby, the small town of ZZYZX (pronounced sàisix) in the U.S. state of California, and the Zoroastrian practice of celestial burial.

Fanzine version of ZZYZX installation and documentation of the project.

Photographic documentation of the display occupied by the 4panel strip. Details. On the following pages, photography and respective illustrations of ZZYZX.

Travel and disorientation within modern infrastructural hubs, contamination and the finiteness of one’s own features, illusion and encounter with spirituality underlie the strip in all its parts, including the text (a poem rather than a short story or dialogue).

An unfinished and conclusion-less discourse is thus set up, open to ever new suggestions, which, however, do not exclude a more superficial, equally legitimate and poetic reading.

THE SANDWICH GUIDE: A GEOROMANTIC ESSAY

THROUGH THE ETHEREAL UN-CANDY Selfpublished comicbook, 64pp., 2020

In The Sandwich Guide: a Georomantic Essay through the Ethereal Un-candy, the sandwich is an excuse to talk about what’s behind a theme as (apparently) simple as the sandwich, in particular its nonculinary and, in a sense, speculative aspects: how a simple idea can be and cannot be universally shared by the individuals, the language and the rhetorics of overcomplicating and contradictory discourse. It is also a work on different registers, that of the critical theory, of the logical mysticism, of the fanzine and, most of all, of the comics and the sequentiality of a collection of images, with which I tried to create a non-fictional kind of comic.

“SER’s book is the byproduct of a mad and reckless mind game”. Review of the book in Sticky Drama newsletter.

Essentially, the sandwich is a pretext for creating a crazy allology, always straddling the line between seriousness and humour, a way of doing comic nonfiction in an atypical way. This unstable limit between the fictional and non-fictional kind of narration in comics isat the center of my research, with references to mixed media.

The section proposed here is the starting point of the treatise, in which synthetically and narratively the discovery (or invention?) of the sandwich is presented to the reader.

At the center of course is the sandwich, but there are multiple topics covered: morphology, choosing how to cut, materials, alignments, and syntactic logic of composition.

The next step in my research on Sandwichology is focused on the dissemination, via a new collective fanzine called The Sandwichology Review and through performative actions called “Degustative-meditative Sandwichology Sessions” where group of people can taste and share thought on theories and practices of Sandwich.

POSTPANOPTIC ARCHITECTURE

Master Degree Thesis in Architecture@Polimi, 2020

Supervisor Prof. Marco Biraghi

This critical and historical thesis is a multidisciplinary study on the most recent urban phenomena of the power to control on the individual made in an architectural form, focusing on the theory of architectural design, on surveillance techniques and on the intersection between these disciplines.

Peculiar aspects of the paradigm shift from a foucauldian surveillance paradigm to a new postpanoptic one are underlined, especially referring to the theory and practice of architecture. Going deeper in the Sidewalk Project case study set in Toronto, new strategies are defined for a contemporary counterplan of autonomization of the user and of the designer in the current postpanoptical landscape, giving to the architect an intellectual and political position of bespeaker of the dialogue between the technologies of surveillance and their influence on the lived space.

Cover Artwork by Bill Connors

This thesis attempts a political and social approach to the most recent manifestations of the relationship between architecture and technology cities, where the boundaries of power are increasingly exercised through virtual administrative tools and, on the other hand, the physical and architectural ones are dematerializing.

In this setting, the role of the architect is also affected by these dynamics, who increasingly loses his centrality within the architectural process to make room for figures from other backgrounds, such as managers, IT technicians and consultants of various types.

The goal of the thesis is to restore centrality to the figure of the architect, in a political sense as well, on issues that affect much of the developed Western countries.

It is precisely with the intention of lucidly unfolding these issues that the chosen case study is investigated, which is believed to be significant for the study of the intertwining of architecture and surveillance: the smart city project for Toronto designed by Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary company of Google/Alphabet.

OBJECT ORIENTED CHOREOGRAPHY

Collaboration for artist Francesco Luzzana, Triennale Teatro dell’Arte, 2020; Romaeuropa Festival, 2021

Object Oriented Choreography (OOC) presents itself as a VR performance/performed installation, at the intersection between the actual and the virtual. In the context of OOC, a performer donning a VR headset becomes the gaze and the engine of an ever-changing apparatus: a zone composed of people, objects, digital platforms, electromagnetic signals, spaces and timings, an accidental interlocking of logistics, dynamics, and rules that allow it to exist, to evolve, and eventually to disappear.

In order to stress the digital complexities our lives are embedded in, OOC proposes a performative approach that juxtaposes two kinds of intelligence: that of the physical body and that of the artificial viewpoint. From their intermingling and interaction, fragments of a choreography emerge, following, and directing streams of information and user inputs. OOC is a mutual, collaborative device: it is dependent on the input of an audience and at the same time it grants and enables their flow, resembling a machinic intelligence with the performer as the interface.

It could be a first-person documentary directed with the body or a performative exploration of a visual dataset for machine learning purposes. More than a finished entity, the choreography stays in continuous becoming with the world, learning and deciphering it from within.

Some images of the performance, documenting the relationship between the performer’s body, UI of the virtual environment and UX of the users, developed in the individual devices. On the right, posters of the event and a further study of the communication.

COMMISSIONED WORKS AND EXHIBITIONS

In my practice, commissioned work remains central, mainly for editorial illustration, exhibitions, and architectural visualizations. Here I mention some of the works I am most satisfied with.

Equally important are my personal editorial self-publishing projects, mainly minicomics and fanzines, in which I curate the realization from end to end. An example of this is “The Sandwich Guide”, shown earlier. I show here some examples of my latest productions.

CNC Bent Peril, 2022, ink and charcoal. Entry for the exhibition Il Tempo è Finito @ DJ Balli’s Sonic Belligeranza Mega Store, organized by Casa Hooligan collective

Cover art, packaging design and fanzine for the musical album SUPER SOFT RESET by Giallorenzo, published by LaTempesta Records in Italy, 2022.

Comic book pages for the fanzine collected in the special edition of SUPER SOFT RESET special edition.

2020, ink charcoal and digital drawing.

Illustration for article, newsletter and playlist by the music label

Illustration for article, newsletter and playlist by the music label Dischi Sotterranei, 2020.

Pages from Horror of Symmetry, a story collected in my personal anthology called IPE, 2023.