Accelerazioni — Sara Levarato

Accelerazioni is the first solo exhibition of Sara Levarato, winner of the second edition of the Recontemporary Prize. The exhibition showcases +1 Day Streak, the artist’s degree project, alongside her new production Non Ultra Metas. Two works that engage in dialogue as if they were two moments of the same trajectory: that of a subject pushed, urged, or compelled to continuously improve, leading the viewer to a profound reflection on the desire – or the condemnation – to constantly surpass one’s own limits.

The day of the opening,  from 6 to 7 pm at Recontemporary, the artist Sara Levarato will be in conversation with various figures such as Daniela Arriado, curator and juror of the prize, Diego Bergamaschi, collector and juror of the prize, Emma Scarafiotti, winner of the last edition and Iole Pellion di Persano, founder of Recontemporary.

The exhibition title, Accelerazioni (Accelerations), does not merely allude to speed but to the intensification of a movement: an acceleration that involves not just the pace of actions but also the social, economic, psychological, and technological pressures that shape subjectivity today. In the age of continuous performance, to accelerate means never to stop improving, updating, and producing. But at what cost? Which bodies, which relationships, which alternatives are sacrificed in the name of this race?

In the video +1 Day Streak, Levarato explores the logic of gamification applied to daily life: a strategy that seems innocuous – introducing game-like dynamics into non-play contexts – but instead reveals itself as a powerful tool for internalizing control. The gamified subject strives to self-govern, perfect, and elevate themselves through small achievements and performance rituals. But this race towards absolute efficiency dissolves the boundaries between play and work, between freedom and coercion. The belief in personal improvement takes on almost religious traits, though with no redemption in sight. The body, now translated into data and visual abstractions, gives way to a performing avatar: observed from the outside, managed, surveilled, and constantly urged to “do more.” +1 Day Streak narrates an internal, invisible yet omnipresent acceleration: that of a subject who self-monitors, self-optimizes, and ultimately merges with their digital alter ego.

If +1 Day Streak immerses us in the daily race of the contemporary individual, Non Ultra Metas raises its gaze toward the myths and ideologies that sustain this very acceleration.

The work takes its cue from the imperial motto Plus Ultra – “further beyond” – adopted by Charles V at the height of the expansionist push of the 16th century. An expression that over time has lost its historical connotations to become a cultural paradigm, a symbol of unlimited ambition that persists to this day: in technological narratives, in startup economies, in the rhetoric of individual efficiency. Through a critical reinterpretation that intertwines history, philosophy, and pop culture, Levarato deconstructs this drive toward the “beyond.” The episode of the Siege of Metz in 1552 – in which the defenders mock Charles V with a banner proclaiming Non Ultra Metas (“not beyond Metz” and “not beyond limits”) – becomes the emblem of a possible counter-narrative: an invitation to recognize limits as a form of resistance, as a possibility to escape the imperative of limitless progress. In a time dominated by the achievement society, as defined by Byung-Chul Han, Non Ultra Metas proposes a symbolic gesture of slowing down, of refusing the endless race toward perfection. It is a critical gaze directed at a present that pretends to have no boundaries, while it imposes new, subtler, and more internalized ones.

These two forms of pressure – the microscopic one of the gamified subjectivity, and the macroscopic one of imperial expansion, technology, capitalism, and the myth of progress – converge on a crucial point: the erosion of limits. A continuous tension between the impulse to surpass and the need to stop, between expansion and collapse, between the ideal of the infinite and the return to measure. In this liminal space, Sara Levarato invites us to observe – and perhaps to slow down.