Post by Daniela Cotimbo

For NERO, I had the opportunity to interview Mark Farid, currently artist-in-residence at the British School at Rome. Over more than ten years of practice, he has investigated how social media platforms, data extraction, surveillance, and privacy violations operate as material conditions capable of shaping the social and cultural context we inhabit. Farid’s actions often appear radical, yet they reveal the profound vulnerability that characterizes the contemporary subject: in attempting to escape the forms of control exercised by technological infrastructures, one quickly realizes how impossible it has become to position oneself entirely outside these logics. “My work places the body at its centre because the body is where participation takes place, where selfhood is experienced, and where the conditions under which agency emerges are encountered, negotiated, and lived.” — Mark Farid Many thanks to NERO Magazine and Marta Pellerini for the opportunity and for making this conversation possible. Photo: Mark Farid, Poisonous Antidote, 2016. Photo by Janez Klenovsek. Courtesy of the artist.