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. The mechanism does not die because it breaks, but because it ceases to be profitable to keep repairing it. In that instant it goes from being merchandise to being waste.

This project intervenes in that condemnation.

I reclaim these "dead" mechanisms (motors, gears, circuit boards, lights) as an archaeological, urban, and everyday action. I deconstruct them and force them to function again, but intentionally poorly, outside their original purpose. That functional "error" is the act of disobedience: the object moves again, lights up, can be heard, gains presence—not to produce but simply to be. It no longer answers to efficiency or utility; it becomes useless and in that uselessness recovers the life the market had taken from it.

They now exist as actors, entities in a scene where they coexist with natural microcosms: terrariums and encapsulated ecosystems. Nature grows among those gears and circuits that no longer circulate anything. The machine, stripped of its productive function, transforms into a clumsy organism that lives alongside and accompanies the silent resistance of vegetation. Where capital saw the end of a consumption cycle, the work proposes another: one where waste does not disappear nor is it recycled in the industrial sense, but is re-signified. It is granted another dignity—the dignity of living matter.

"Esse est percipi" (in Latin, "to be is to be perceived")

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

(Project started in 2023, ongoing evolution)