Exhibition “Chess Cyborg Movie”

LUCCA FILM FESTIVAL 2026
presents

CHESS CYBORG MOVIE
An exhibition by Simone Domeniconi

Curated by Riccardo Ferrucci

Lucca | Palazzo Guinigi | Via Guinigi 29
11 September – 2 October 2026

From 11 September to 2 October 2026, the museum spaces of Palazzo Guinigi in Lucca will host CHESS CYBORG MOVIE, a solo exhibition by Simone Domeniconi, presented by Lucca Film Festival
2026.

Some artists describe their time by representing it. Others choose to interpret it, creating a visual language capable of bringing apparently distant worlds into dialogue. It is within this second approach that the work of Simone Domeniconi (Carpi, 1972) has developed. For more than fifteen years, chess has been central to his practice, not simply as an iconographic subject, but as an artistic language and a structure for thought. With CHESS CYBORG MOVIE, this research enters a new phase.

Cinema, art history and artificial intelligence come together within a single visual universe, in which each element interacts with the others through a precise conceptual framework. Chess is no longer a
game, but a metaphor for history, memory, geopolitics, human relationships and the major cultural transformations shaping our time.

The exhibition brings together around twenty works that reinterpret some of the most iconic images and masterpieces in film history. Fellini, Kubrick, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Wolfgang Petersen, Ingmar Bergman and other major filmmakers are not simply referenced, but absorbed into a new visual narrative in which painting, sculpture, cinema and contemporary culture coexist.

The original images are displaced from their familiar meanings and transformed into tools for reflecting on the present. Within this process, cyborgs take on a central role.

They do not represent a distant science-fiction future, but the reality we are already inhabiting. The machine enters the history of art, confronts classical beauty, moves through myth, reshapes memory and asks the viewer to reconsider the very meaning of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence.

At the core of the project remains Domeniconi’s relationship with chess. Each work takes its title from a real chess match, selected not merely for chronological or geographical reasons, but for its symbolic, historical, geopolitical or conceptual connection to the image depicted.

The match thus becomes an integral part of the artwork itself, expanding its meaning and transforming painting into a system of relationships, references and multiple layers of interpretation.

In CHESS CYBORG MOVIE, Michelangelo and Giorgio de Chirico coexist with Stanley Kubrick and Federico Fellini; classical mythology meets science fiction, and cinema intersects with painting. These are not quotations or stylistic exercises, but elements within an autonomous visual language that continually brings past and future, memory and innovation, humanity and technology into dialogue.

As curator Riccardo Ferrucci writes: “The poetic world of Simone Domeniconi is a space in which parallel universes coexist and converge: from chess to robots, from the history of painting to the history of cinema. The achievement of Chess Cyborg Movie lies in the creation of an individual lyrical world that does not simply represent reality, but gives form to an autonomous poetic dimension shaped by dream and imagination.

It constructs a virtual world in which a different future is staged — a tomorrow that is already today. Through an ongoing exploration of languages and techniques, materials and styles, Domeniconi creates dreams and visionary spaces, unforgettable images and fragile mirages capable of standing against the greyness of the world we inhabit.”

Rather than offering answers, the exhibition raises a question that follows the visitor throughout the entire journey: What place will human sensitivity continue to occupy in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence?

It is within this question that Simone Domeniconi’s artistic research finds one of its most significant new developments.