Federico Solmi

FROM THE BOOK

"Solmi designs a parallel world in the shape of a video game, which, like every video game, participates from its own system of rules, behaviors, and attributes. Solmi uses video games as a medium in order to critically scrutinize the political reality of the present and generate critical thinking in the culture that is immersed. The role of the player is substituted for the one of the spectator, in which the possibility of any action is amputated. This relationship with the work is reduced until it actually adopts the role of the simulator, playing a game that already has an end. However, there is a subversion of the traditional roles with the lack of empathy for the protagonist of the game and knowing that the end is clear.
Emerging from Solmi's work is not only the most cutting-edge tendencies and cultural thinkers, but some classics as well, such as Luigi Pirandello. The dramatist and the artist coincide with the permanent and simultaneous presence of humor and fatality. Pirandello, like Solmi, is able to combine critique, irony, the comic and the pathetic, establishing a game of opponents which at first makes you laugh spontaneously and immediately after is transformed into a bittersweet aftertaste."

Bianca de la Torre, excerpted from Douche Bag City in Federico Solmi.