1+1+1…: Paolo De. ‘The Monarch’s Game’

The Monarch’s Game is a collection of animated tales that succeed each other in a series of loops, in which the figure of the monarch (the bird that inspired the Twitter logo) appears trapped in the structures of various automatons. Once and again, it is restricted to the pre-set movement logic of the machines, much like the bird in a cuckoo clock. This mutilated bird within its digital prison is the artist’s way of suggesting the false freedom to which he has been exposed in the network of the Web 3.0 NFT community.

His work, was happily integrated in the cryptographic field under the boom of the promise of freedom of creation and the decentralised nature of the blockchain, has once again been mutilated by censorship. In this case, it is the politicised censorship that singles him out as a public enemy of the United States, under the current sanctions according to which American companies cannot supply goods or services to any users from sanctioned countries (which include Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, Ukraine, and Venezuela).

The Monarch’s Game thus becomes another symptom of the history of endless slavery and censorship of Cuban (artists), both within and without Cuba, at the physical or virtual levels.