THE LONG ROAD OF SILICON (2020)

This special project for Art Journal consists of COLL.EO’s replay of Pasolini’s “The Long Road of Sand”. Titled The Long Road of Silicon the project is a travelogue featuring black-and-white screenshots taken by the artists and accompanied by extended captions that mimic Pasolini’s writing style - sometimes lifting entire sentences and adding a few twists - highlighting the visual ideology of Forza Horizon 2, which painstakingly simulates the look-and-feel of an idealized, pastoral, “postcard-like” Italian landscape.

In the summer of 1959, Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled the entire Italian coastline at the wheel of a Fiat 1100 with Paolo di Paolo, a photographer, starting from Ventimiglia in June and reaching Trieste in August. Overall, he drove for more than three thousand kilometers. During his motorized pilgrimage, Pasolini visited famous seaside resorts – Sanremo, Livorno, Fregene, Naples, Taranto, Syracuse, Pescara, Ancona, Venice, and many more – and wrote a travel journal which was subsequently published in three installments by Successo magazine between July and September of the same year under the title “La lunga strada di sabbia” (The Long Road of Sand). Sixty years later, COLL.EO revisits this journey by driving through a virtual Belpaese, the fictional Italian towns of Castelletto, San Giovanni, Montellino featured in Forza Horizon 2 (Microsoft Game Studios, 2014), a vast, open world. This time, the journey took place on the screen.