Donato Sansone. Metaversi (Donato Sansone. Metaverses)

From 7 April to 8 September 2025, the Reception Level of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin will host DONATO SANSONE. METAVERSES, curated by Bruno Di Marino. This is the first solo exhibition devoted to Donato Sansone, an artist, animator and creator of short films, music videos, commercials and other audiovisual “pranks”. His surreal and provocative works employ a wide range of techniques to translate different visions of reality into graphic art and animation.
 

On Monday 7 April at 8.30 pm, Cinema Massimo in Turin will also host an evening dedicated to Sansone, featuring a selection of his films.
 

Like the historic avant-garde movements, Sansone blends high and low culture, the poetic and the vulgar, the comic and the tragic—disrupting conventional thought and provoking a bitter, unsettling laughter in the viewer. His is a world of irreverence and paradox, shaped by a playful and provocative Surrealism that moves between the handmade and the digital.
 

His patchworks and videos have been presented at major festivals around the world and in numerous galleries, as well as in heavily frequented public spaces such as shopping centres. He is also highly regarded within the Italian music scene and has collaborated extensively with Subsonica, Manuel Agnelli, Paolo Spaccamonti, Francesco De Gregori, Afterhours and Verdena.

The exhibition spans twenty years of Donato Sansone’s career and unfolds through a rich and colourful display of original drawings, digital prints, installations and a wealth of moving images, allowing visitors to discover his eclectic visual art. The metaverse is a virtual dimension that can be inhabited and explored. The exhibition invites visitors to surrender themselves to a chaotic flow of signs, images, sounds, noises, perceptions, fragments of bodies and landscapes, and rapid visual associations. Rather than a single metaverse, it presents many different metaverses, in which each visitor may discover something unique: attractive and disturbing, comic and horrific, physical and immaterial, erotic and phantasmagorical. 

Italian Sign Language (LIS) videos are available throughout every section of the exhibition. The Museum’s Educational Services will also offer a workshop for groups attending summer activity centres.

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Donato Sansone. Metaverses, edited by Bruno Di Marino and published by Silvana Editoriale. In addition to materials from the exhibition, the volume includes Sansone’s graphic novel Il gatto.

The exhibition forms part of a wider project to preserve and promote Donato Sansone’s work. The Film Archive of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema holds all the works he has produced since the beginning of his career.

The exhibition is included in the Echoes section of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival and will remain open throughout the festival, from 16 April to 2 June 2025.