Paolo Cirio IT
obscurity
Video installation
Exhibition : “Disobedience in the Digital Age”
From October 23 to December 13, 2026
From Wednesday to Sunday, 2pm to 7pm
Friche la Belle de Mai
La Tour, 4th floor
Marseille
This artwork is composed of more than fifteen million mugshots of people arrested in the United States. It disrupted the databases of six websites specializing in mugshots by cloning them, blurring their images, and mixing their data. The work has faced legal threats from the owners of these sites and has received support from victims of blackmail involving these photos. *Obscurity* explores the ethics of information and the emotional underpinnings of an unflattering reputation exposed on the Internet. Beyond his documentation of mass incarceration, social experimentation, and performative hacking, the artist also devised the “Right to Remove” online privacy policy, which advocates for the legal right to remove personal information from search engines by adapting the “right to be forgotten” to the American context.
Paolo Almario
An artist of Colombian origin who has been based in Chicoutimi (Quebec, Canada) since 2011, Paolo Almario has developed a transdisciplinary practice in which digital technologies, robotic systems, and social critique explore the spatiality of being: the dynamic relationship between the individual and the spaces they inhabit, whether physical or metaphorical. A graduate of the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), he refined his approach through a Master of Arts degree (2014) at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC), where he now teaches in the Department of Arts, Letters, and Language.
