In SABOTAGE, Vitale examines the hidden human labour sustaining the digital economy, questioning the systems of automation, surveillance and algorithmic control that increasingly shape contemporary working conditions. The exhibition exposes a central contradiction of technological progress: behind the promise of automation lies a vast workforce whose labour is largely invisible, precarious and subject to continuous monitoring.
Salvatore Vitale, Listen All Y’All, It’s a Sabotage, 2022
Developed through collaborations with South African freelancers, SABOTAGE investigates how contemporary digital infrastructures reproduce historical and colonial patterns of extraction, exploitation and inequality. Through the notion of sabotage, Vitale explores possibilities of resistance, refusal and agency within systems designed to regulate and control human labour.
Bringing together film, photography and sculptural installations, SABOTAGE connects the invisible processes of digital labour to their material consequences, revealing a system driven by productivity, exhaustion and obsolescence.
Salvatore Vitale
Salvatore Vitale is an Italian artist, director and professor currently based in Switzerland. His research-driven practice explores the complexity of contemporary societies, focusing on the politics of systems that regulate modernity and the impact of technological transformations. Using expanded and speculative storytelling, combining photography, video, writing, digital data overlays, and participative and interactive installations, Vitale engages with critical themes in contemporary art and visual culture.
His work is featured in several public and private collections and has been widely exhibited in museums and at international festivals, with solo exhibitions at Photo Elysée, Loop Barcelona, Fotofestiwal Lodz, Ncontemporary Gallery, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive FMAV, Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, OGR Torino, MASI Lugano, Swiss Center of Photography, MOCAK – Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, and Photoforum Pasquart. He has also shown at renowned festivals and institutions such as MAST Foundation, Focal Point Gallery, Fotografia Europea, Mannheim Biennale, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Ci.Clo Bienal Porto, Foam Amsterdam, Lianzhou Foto Festival, OCAT Shenzhen, and OCAT Shanghai.
