Saturday, November 29, 2025 - 20:00h
Casa del Lector Auditorium
Collaborative prototype presentation

Noura Tafeche, Nadia Armstrong, Valentina Ruiz D'Eramo, Miguel Ruipérez de la Fuente, Ángela Rodríguez Relaño.

Launched in 2017 as part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic diversification plan, NEOM is presented as a futuristic city powered by renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and zero-emission infrastructures. This prototype approaches NEOM not as a traditional urban plan but as a visual apparatus—a system of codes that pre-enact and project how the future is prophesied, sold, and imposed. In this sense, NEOM becomes a case study for examining how contemporary nation-building intersects with institutional futurism and the aestheticisation of public policy. The future is imagined, constructed, and made desirable.

This prototype has been developed collaboratively based on an initial proposal by Noura Tafeche.
 

The research project Iblīs dwells a Line is granted by the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025) and promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Webinar
 

About Noura Tafeche 
 

Visual artist, “onomaturge”, and independent researcher whose practice moves across installation, archival methodologies, experimental labs, videos, neologism creation, and miniature drawing. Her research explores visual culture and its techno-political entanglements, with a focus on digital militarism, online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches, and meme culture. She is also engaged in language experimentation and the visual articulation of contemporary imaginaries.  
 

She holds an MA in New Technologies for Art from the Brera Academy, with a particular focus on the field of net.art but The Influencers Festival has been her real education. She has exhibited, lectured, and led laboratories at Aksioma (Ljubljana), transmediale (Berlin), Disruption Network Lab (Berlin), Aarhus Kunsthal (Aarhus), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur), Foto Colectania (Barcelona), Design Museum (Helsinki), Tainan Art Museum (Tainan), Tomorrow Maybe (Hong Kong), Triennale Milano (Milan), Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milano), Almanac Inn (Turin), Dutch Art Institute (Arnhem), Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), and the European Union Representative Centre (Al Quds, Palestine). 

 

Collaborators profile

• The project seeks collaborators with expertise in video production, 3D animation, and speculative/experimental design.  
• Specifically, it would benefit from animators skilled in CGI and motion graphics, capable of deconstructing the aesthetic language of architectural renderings and techno-futurist urban imagery.  
• Filmmakers or video editors with experience in experimental documentary or essay film formats could support the development of audiovisual storytelling.  
• Designers engaged in speculative design practices are essential to help create conceptual objects, fictional devices, or counter-prototypes that respond to the project’s themes. 
• Ideal collaborators are interested in the intersection of visual culture, geopolitics, and anticolonial studies, and are open to interdisciplinary and research-based methods.