A new magazine is out. Single issue, for the moment, with all the advice to be or become "The perfect housewife". Many photos of young, handsome and smiling men, well combed and with pleated trousers among dishes to wash and clothes to iron. An apron over his shirt, and a baby in his arms while his wife reads the newspaper in an armchair. An entire page is dedicated to the preparation of coffee: to be served in a porcelain cup, after grinding the beans.

The Modern Man takes strollers to the park and lovingly handles the sewing machine with which he makes little dresses and pretty placemats. Shopping? One of the most beautiful moments. The joyful housewife loads himself up with shopping bags, already thinking with delight about what he will prepare for dinner. For a snack, he baked a cream cake topped with cherries. Don't forget to arrange bouquets of flowers on the mantelpiece so that your wife can immediately rejoice when she returns from a tiring day at work.

Estimated time for all these tasks, 25 hours a day. But - poor us - the mutation is only imagined and the magazine with the graphics and advertisements from the Fifties is nothing other than the unusual brochure, and art object, of the solo show by Nikzone, alias Nicoletta Zonchello. Curated by Caterina Ghisu, the exhibition inaugurated at the Ghetto on a fateful day, March 8, and visible until the 31st, welcomes visitors with a lounge featuring a green velvet sofa, coffee tables, and a wet bar: furnishings that are a reference philological of “Just what is it makes today's homes so different, so appealing?”, a 1956 work by Richard Hamilton.

Concrete furniture from yesteryear, but everything else is the result of artificial intelligence which, says the author, at some stage seemed to want to refuse this unusual change of roles. In the Ghetto room, two-sided panels with the images of a male population intent on gazing at themselves with their pocket squares in the pocket of tailored jackets that fit perfectly. Vanity, your name is woman.

But in this multimedia installation co-produced by Agorà Sardegna and Coopculture, the only two ladies present in effigy leaf through magazines and smoke cigarettes. In practice they do nothing and don't feel guilty. And they don't even glance at the icons, framed like paintings, of the indispensable tools of the good housewife: the feather duster, the blender, the rubber gloves, the vacuum cleaner. To reiterate the concepts, a video that loops the billboards hanging from the ceiling with their bright and soothing colors. Nicoletta Zonchello did extensive research on period material to document herself.

Resorting to AI doesn't scare her, on the contrary. Furthermore, she has a degree in Literature and Multimedia Production Sciences, has a master's degree in Computer Science and Communication and another in Museology/Museum Studies. And being an artist she manages to recreate (with irony) the optimistic lies as well as the aesthetics of a period which looked like gold and wasn't.

It therefore implements a uchronia, writes Caterina Ghisu in the critical text, "which stimulates a reflection on social and cultural boundaries".

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