We touch screens, but never touch each other: an exhibition on digital surfaces as a form of skin

To think of the screen as a surface means definitively abandoning the idea that it is merely a medium of representation. The screen is no longer a window, nor a neutral interface: it is a skin. A sensitive, permeable surface that produces experience before it produces images. In this conceptual shift, the classical distinction between body and technology dissolves into an unstable zone of contact, where the visible is constructed through touch and touch becomes a form of vision.

It is against this theoretical backdrop that “A SCREEN HAS NO EDGES”,  Emanuela Moretti’s solo exhibition presented by Studio Orma in Rome through February 12, takes shape. Curated by Gianlorenzo Chiaraluce, the show activates these ideas through an environment that reconstructs a disturbed domestic interior, inhabited by forms oscillating between body and infrastructure.

Moretti’s sculptures resemble mechanomorphic organisms: light, modular vertebrae linked together, functioning at once as skeleton and network. Onto these structures are grafted “digital skins” torn into fragments — low-definition prints that openly declare their origin in the web. As Chiaraluce explains, “Emanuela works extensively with digital imagery, but she does not directly use digital media: there are no videos, no graphic manipulations. The digital is approached from a material standpoint, through sculpture, through muscular practices.” This return to manual making is not nostalgic but critical: it is a way of reclaiming the digital through the body.

As Chiaraluce observes, “today this constant epidermal exchange we have with the surfaces we move through — quite simply the screens we use every day — is not superficial at all: it is a tactile, material relationship, always generating new meanings and potentially extendable to infinity.” Far from being a limit, the surface becomes a field of intensity, a site of affective and perceptual accumulation.

Emanuela Moretti

In this sense, the haptic is not merely an alternative sensory register to sight, but an epistemological mode. The gesture of scrolling, of repeated touching, of continuously traversing a surface is a recursive practice, almost a form of caressing. “Let’s imagine caressing it, this surface,” Chiaraluce suggests, “moving across it through other temporalities: touch with the screen has a gestural quality that becomes practice, that constructs meaning over time.” Digital contact promises proximity while simultaneously deferring it: to touch never truly means to meet.

It is precisely in this paradox that the screen-skin reveals its political ambiguity. If touch implies reciprocity, the screen simulates it without ever fulfilling it. The other is always present as image, projection, avatar, yet remains structurally unreachable. “What we often have,” the curator notes, “is the illusion of being able to touch the other through sight, through surfaces that suggest carnality but remain fictitious.” The digital thus constructs a new form of solipsism: an intimate room in which the self multiplies without ever truly leaving itself. The skin that emerges in the exhibition is never harmonious integration. It is a dismembered, atomized skin, capable of being extended, replicated, concatenated until the image detonates. In this process, identity dissolves: what remains is an available surface, continuously renegotiated. “The work stages the paradox of our era,” the curator states, “a mechanized and industrial reality that, while incessantly negotiating its materiality, still attempts to preserve a residual carnality.”

The domestic objects on view — the curtain, the mirror, the sink — function as symbolic devices of this gap. The curtain, printed with the nape of a girl’s neck, covers no window: behind it there is a wall. “Its function is simulated,” Chiaraluce observes. “It addresses an opening that does not exist.” It is a gesture that makes explicit the logic of the screen: to promise access while returning only reflection.

Gianlorenzo Chiaraluce

In this room, the image no longer functions as transparent representation but as opaque infrastructure. Low resolution, visible pixels, graininess are not formal defects but ontological statements. “Online images are tiny squares placed side by side,” Chiaraluce reminds us, “a visual scaffolding that we call a digital image.” Bringing the image to the limit of its definition means exposing the process that generates it, allowing its technical materiality and artificial status to emerge.

Finally, the theme of the self runs through the entire project as a psychic resonance. It is not a matter of constructing multiple identities in a relational sense, but of multiplying the self within a closed, domestic, self-referential space. “The other,” the curator explains, “is often the self reflected in other surfaces and returning through a reflection.” The screen, like the mirror, thus becomes the site of continuous osmosis: the self projects outward only to return, filtered, diminished, transformed.

“A SCREEN HAS NO EDGES” constructs a field of experience in which skin and screen coincide, and in which the haptic is not an escape from the visual but its destiny. A surface without edges, indeed — one that does not delimit but absorbs — and that, in doing so, radically redefines the way we feel, see, and inhabit images.

All images: Installation view “A screen has no edges”. Courtesy the artist and Studio Orma