BOLOGNA.- From 29 October, Fondazione MAST presents The Quiet Machine, the first major solo exhibition in Italy by the Belgian artist David Claerbout (Kortrijk, 1969). The exhibition, curated by Francesco Zanot, is one of the most comprehensive retrospectives of his work, exploring the relationship between industry, technology and nature through nine film installations—including two previously unseen works—and a dozen drawings, arranged across a linear exhibition itinerary on the first floor of MAST and a site-specific installation on the ground floor.

Claerbout began his career as a painter and gradually moved towards photography, film, and new media, producing works in which these disciplines exist both individually and combined. His reflection on technology is a fundamental part of his artistic practice and contributes to the definition of a multifaceted and complex artistic language. His works are the result of an extremely sophisticated and constantly updated computational infrastructure: photographs taken in different places and at different times are used as source material and recomposed into a single visual flow; 3D modelling, animation, generative software and artificial intelligence all contribute to creating images that are as realistic as they are unreal, but with technology never taking centre stage and the complexity of the processes remaining in the background.

Time has always been one of the main themes around which Claerbout’s work revolves; he investigates it, shapes it, fragments it, and stretches it. The duration of his works can reach extreme proportions, ranging up to an entire day or even extending to infinity, as in the case of his real-time computer-generated films. His name regularly features among the filmmakers who have made the longest films of all time. His practice revolves around the concepts of temporality and duration through images suspended in a constant tension between stillness and movement, offering the experience of ceaseless becoming. In his work, events no longer exist, reduced to the bare minimum of their potential and almost dissolved into duration: attention thus turns to the process, turning the works into “quiet machines” amidst the proliferation of images that are continually produced, consumed and forgotten.

A recurring theme in this exhibition is labour: the work of the protagonists of his films, the theoretical and technical work of the artist, the work of the machine (software, algorithms, rendering engines), and the interpretative work of the viewers, which Claerbout always places at the centre of his reflection: “I do not surrender to the hegemony of montage… What interests me is finding a way to look at a surface in motion without the viewer being forced into passivity”.

Nature is often depicted, but without being separated from the technological world. The forest and the hangar, the sun and the algorithm, plant growth and industrial production are all governed by the same principle: nothing is static; nothing is ever truly complete. In this sense, Claerbout’s works invite us to take part in a process of change that unfolds over time.

The 12 drawings featured in the exhibition represent a further form of the artist’s reflection, in which technological complexity gives way to the elemental relationship between thought, manual skill and graphic mark. Each of these drawings refers to a specific film, but does not constitute preparatory material; rather, it represents a stage in the creative process, comprising diagrams, notes, illustrations and fragments of images that record the artist’s idea as it takes shape. Claerbout’s drawings serve as maps that enable him to keep track of the process, constantly checking his position at every stage against the original project.

Claerbout’s films are genuine constructions—mobile, welcoming structures, luminous and serene (but not necessarily reassuring), which continue to resonate long after our viewing of them is over, replacing the element of surprise with something able to settle in our memory. As Francesco Zanot writes: “Claerbout’s works never give the impression of seeking to prove anything, but rather function as devices that create the conditions for taking part in an experience. They do not compel us to believe what we see, nor do they force us to constantly question its degree of reality or artificiality. They neither seek the perfect illusion, nor to expose the illusion. They invite us, quite simply, to take part in a change that unfolds over time”.

The nine films on show (including the two previously unseen films, Eagle Eye and The Forest and the Wood) are:

• The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment (2008) is set on a small football pitch on a rooftop in the Casbah of Algiers, with a view over its labyrinth of houses facing the Mediterranean Sea and stretches a single moment, captured from hundreds of different angles, into a 37-minute photographic projection.

• Sunrise (2009) shows a maid tidying a house still shrouded in darkness before its inhabitants wake up. Once her work is done, she goes out and rides off on her bike, while the night gradually gives way to the light of dawn. In contrast to conventional narrative structure, the end of the film thus coincides with a double beginning: that of the new day and that of the protagonist’s day ahead.

• Breathing Bird (2012) depicts two birds facing each other on either side of a windowsill, entering each other’s field of vision while remaining physically separate. In the cold outdoor air, the breath of one of the birds creates a small patch of tiny frozen water droplets on the window separating them.

• Oil workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013), meticulously re-constructed a small jpeg image found on the Internet, using 3D modelling software from a small JPEG image found on the internet, shows a group of men taking shelter from the monsoon rain. The longer one looks at the image, the more the men seem to be prisoners of their hope for better times—better weather, but perhaps also better times in life.

• The Woodcarver and the Forest (2025) centres on a man who slowly carves thousands of wooden spoons while, almost imperceptibly, the forest around him disappears. Through a minimal, repetitive action, Claerbout relates the time taken for manual labour to that of environmental transformation. In a film lasting over 24 hours, the gradual disappearance of the landscape thus transforms an everyday gesture into a reflection on the relationship between humankind and the environment.

• Aircraft (F.A.L.) (2015–2021) shows an aeroplane floating inside a large industrial hangar, suspended between assembly and abandonment. The real space, captured by Claerbout, is combined with an elaborate digital reconstruction, creating the illusion of photographic reality. The aeroplane appears simultaneously under construction and already obsolete, superimposing future and past in a new, impossible temporality.

• The Close (2022) is conceived as a journey through the past and future of the camera. The work draws a parallel between the reconstruction of an amateur film from the 1920s and a digital 3D reworking of that same footage.

• Eagle Eye (2026) runs for several consecutive hours and centres on a white-headed American eagle— motionless yet watchful—lying on an operating table and filmed from various angles. The film, created using archive footage of rescued birds of prey, which was subsequently reworked through a lengthy, methodical and extremely meticulous animation process combining CGI and generative artificial intelligence, evokes an enigmatic relationship between the artificial and computational realm and organic life.

• The Forest and the Wood (2026) depicts a larch forest in Val Fex, Switzerland, which is first digitally constructed and then gradually felled by a team of virtual workers. Once it has disappeared, the forest is reconstructed simply by reversing the film’s timeline. Claerbout thus contrasts the reversibility of the digital world with natural processes, which cannot be so easily halted or reversed.