UNBOXING | A nomadic project of digital exhibitions

UNBOXING is a nomadic project of digital exhibitions. Taking shape through websites, social media content, radio programs, live videos, Zoom meetings, and even WhatsApp conversations, UNBOXING investigates the digital spaces of contemporary art networks — from galleries and institutions to artist-run spaces, workshops, collectives, and studios. UNBOXING aims to unlock new intangible venues and to trace possible digital paths beyond existing patterns.

From one chapter to the next, the participants are invited to explore the potential of these platforms. They are invited to narrate, interpret and document their work using digital tools. Rather than positioning the virtual as a substitute for reality, UNBOXING seeks to engage with its codes, subvert its lexicon, and generate a place where new encounters, questions, and tales can unfold.

UNBOXING slides from analyzing the relationship between artist, artwork, and virtuality to rethinking the very concept of digital space. Within this “programmed” field, the content is fed by the virtual environment itself and by its inner limits and assets : accessibility, temporality, (in)visibility, erasure, contamination, perception and attention.

Transcending the opposition between reality and virtuality, UNBOXING opens up the discussion about the use of digital technology, and its impact. The idea is to explore a porous terrain, a terrain of confluences, a terrain that challenges established roles (or otherwise). The goal is once again to use the digital medium by “sidestepping” it, by analyzing its impact in order to contextualize it, in the face of a possible legacy.

On the website, the project becomes an evolving archive where information branches out and proliferates. We explore the idea of an archaeology of the present, of the ruins or relics that make up our personal and collective memory.

UNBOXING generates new questions thanks to the reactions of artists, curators, poets and creative thinkers who use a medium that is never fixed and whose future cannot be predicted.

(Anna Donà, Ombeline de Nombel / trad. Juliet Powys)

In 2026, UNBOXING enters a new cycle of exhibitions inspired by the work, practices and encounters that have taken place within a specific location: Atelier 13F, the artists’ studios at 13 rue
Fontaine, Saint-Denis, France.

Through this new collaboration, UNBOXING shifts from temporarily inhabiting the digital
channels and spaces associated with physical locations (initially, the gallery) to creating new virtual
spaces where they do not yet exist, opening up additional rooms as extensions of the tangible, physical site.

UNBOXING x 13F focuses on the space of creation and production. Collaborating with artists based at 13F means investigating their relationship to the space and time of production, while continuing to show their work through the possibilities offered by digital tools and networks.

As the project unfolds, it will feature the works of a selection of artists from the atelier in a non-linear, unpredictable sequence, within a new series of virtual exhibitions in which each chapter is dedicated to a single artistic proposition.

Developing the project within the 13F studios also allows us to reconsider notions of temporality, accessibility and interaction, from the physical to the virtual and back.

Moving from one studio to another, UNBOXING will try to identify the key places where contact, dialogue and exchange occur. Across the diversity of practices presented, the project will take shape around a series of recurring themes, creating connections from one proposal to the next.

(Anna Donà)