Filippo Minelli's "Contradictions"

("Facebook," spray paint on scrap-yard, Bamako - Mali, 2008)

("Microsoft," Paint on barrels, Bamako - Mali. 2008)

We found out about Filippo Minelli's work via the folks at The Wooster Collective, and we love the clever juxtaposition of Web 2.0 and poverty in the developing world in his ongoing series "Contradictions." It's a gentle reminder that the digital divide is very real, and that we insulate ourselves from reality by creating these false online universes. Actually, let's just let the artist explain it:

All my "Contradictions" ongoing project has the same motivation/meaning. Technologies and the marketing behind them usually push the almost religious aspect of their evolution, as also said by Leander Kaheny in his "Cult of Mac" book, and the users are pushed to live in an intense way the abstraction from reality, living technologies only as an idea and sometimes without even knowing their real functions. And this aspect works for the social-networks too. The idealization connected with these experiences provokes a small-but-important detach of the perception of reality and what i want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies. It's a kind of reminder, for people like me which i'm an Apple user and also have social-network accounts that the real world is deeply far from the idealization we have of it, not only in the third world and even if technologies and globalization are good things. I hope it's clear and sorry for my italian-english" ;)

You can see more of Filippo's work here.