Diego Aprigliano

Erroneous Reinterpretations

A discarded object carries a sentence: it was programmed to stop serving. Obsolescence is not an accident of capitalism; it is its fuel. A mechanism dies not because it breaks, but because it ceases to be profitable to repair, and at that instant, it shifts from commodity to trash, from value to waste.

This project intervenes in that sentence.

I recover these "dead" mechanisms (motors, gears, boards, lights) from a daily urban archaeology, and force them to function again, but wrongly, outside their original purpose. That functional "error" is an act of disobedience: the object moves again, lights up, has presence—not to produce, but simply to be. It no longer answers to efficiency or utility; it becomes useless in a new way, and in that uselessness, it recovers something the market had taken from it.

In these installations, that technological waste becomes the support for natural microcosms: terrariums and encapsulated ecosystems growing among gears and circuits that no longer circulate anything. The machine, stripped of its productive function, transforms into a clumsy organism that accompanies, or barely moves, the silent resistance of the vegetation. Where capital saw the end of a consumption cycle, the work proposes another: one where waste neither disappears nor is recycled in the industrial sense, but is re-signified, returning to it the dignity of living matter.

These constructions are not monuments to garbage: they are imaginary and dystopian landscapes, where nature reclaims ground among the circuits and where what productive logic declared useless becomes the foundation of another way of existing. Garbage, here, ceases to be the end of the chain and becomes the vanishing point.

(Project initiated in 2023, continuously evolving.)