Taste of 2025

Image: *From the summit of Amariana - taken during one of my visits to Friuli, Italy* by David Schmudde is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

Some of my highlights from last year - books, movies, exhibitions, travel, and more.

I did not read a single great book this year! I need to curate better next year.

I also didn’t prioritize watching film, so only two older shorts really stood out. The first was Piattaforma Luna by Yuri Ancarani (2011, 26 min), a slow, almost hypnotic film following a group of six scuba divers who specialize in deep underwater operations. The second was Peter Tscherkassky’s one-minute found-footage film Get Ready (1999), dense and explosive despite its brevity.

Everything else about the year, though, was genuinely great.

Music

Concerts

Fatoumata Diawara at Heroes Festival at Cascina Falchera was a blast. And I was happy to get to the second year of Stanze Fredde Fest’s brand of minimal wave/dark wave at El Paso Occupato in Turin; Oberst Panizza’s Italo Disco-infused set really stood out.

New Music

I listened to a lot of Stanze Fredde Vol. 2.

Pixel Grip’s new album Percepticide: The Death of Reality is a polished take on the aggressive, synth drenched sound that I always love.

The 2025 Soft Vein LP, Through Blinds, is better than their more recent EP. It’s the place to start for some serious post-punk.

Travels

The farthest: Kathmandu, Nepal, which tied for the second highest altitude at 1,400m - just edging out my hike to the summit of Cuarnan in Carnia, Italy. The highest: skiing in Chamonix, France at 2,400m with my Yorba co-founders.

Other than a visit with friends in Puglia, Italy, my travel centered on family visits with my young Lion (22 months old this month!) in Peoria, IL, USA and Udine, Italy.

Podcasts

The Orthogonal Bet episode with Sara Walker on Life As No One Knows It and Assembly Theory.

Exhibitions

This was the richest year in recent memory for great exhibitions; it was book-ended with two major shows on art and technology

Vertical Roll by Joan Jonas (1972) at “The Living End,” Chicago, IL, USA by David Schmudde is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

In January I went to The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA. Image: Amiga Installation by Andy Warhol (1985/2015) at “The Living End,” Chicago, IL, USA by David Schmudde is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

From the exhibition catalog:

Frederic Billingsley coined the term “pixel” in 1965, which is roughly where The Living End unofficially begins. This minuscule mark, known as a picture element, describes the smallest fragment of information available in a digitally derived image (pg 13)

The exhibition and this essay favor a discursive view of painting-especially its tropes, such as the landscape, still life, nude, and history and religious painting - and its continued prominence in the Western canon. (pg 12)

On the other side of 2025, December was marked by a visit to Electric Dreams: Art & Technology Before the Internet at OGR in Turin - a survey of kinetic and digital art before the internet. Also a great retrospective but more limited in its ambition.

Other notable exhibitions:

Bird Dream Machine by Teresa Solar Abboud at Sandretto. From the exhibition description:

Resembling pieces of beaks and fins, the sculptures play on the duality between the rough, earthy clay of the bases and the sleek, smooth resin of the protruding shapes, suggesting both the prehistoric beings that make up the subsoil and the machines that excavate them. This contrast in material reflects different substrates of time, from the primordial to the modern, to reveal underlying structures hidden beneath the surface. Arranged one after another around a circular room, the sculptures repeat to create a rhythm and movement that evokes the centrifugal force of a vortex.

To Leave is To Return by Brittany Nelson at Quartz Studio. Again, the exhibition description:

Created using a screen capture from the film Solaris (1972), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, a large-scale silver gelatin print depicts the ocean outside of the window of a spaceship. [… It] has been printed and recaptured on high-speed analog film by Nelson and developed with chemistry which causes the silver grains of the film to clump together. The result is an image that feels delicate, almost ephemeral, and appears to be made of static or sand grains.

Also at Quartz Studio was Romain Dumesnil’s Calore. The photographs don’t do this site-specific installation justice so I’ll include this beautiful quote from the exhibition from Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson:

Like the terrestrial crust of the earth / which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul / is a miracle of mutual pressures.

Finally, Vedova Tintoretto. In dialogo at Palazzo Madama in October was impeccably staged, guiding the viewer through Vedova’s relationship with Tintoretto and culminating in Vedova’s masterwork.

Essays

“Alexandra David-Néel: My Journey to Lhasa” in The Culturium details Alexandra David-Néel’s journey deep into Tibet - an incredible story of resilience:

Even when the odds are stacked against them, David-Néel is always resourceful. Utterly fatigued by many long hours of tramping, she is desperate to light a fire to make buttered tea and generate warmth, using an esoteric breathing technique, which involves going into a trancelike state in order to raise the internal temperature of the body.

Meditation

My first visit to Kathmandu was a major meditation experience. I sat in several spaces built for the Karma Kagyu lineage, including the one in Swayambhu. I also trekked out to Pharping, Nepal for something of a Padmasambhava pilgrimage. It was a powerful experience.

The Nepal government collapsed just days after my most intense meditation experiences in Pharping. I wrote about that convergence here.