Zakamoto’s Pinocchio meets Japan.
The wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a child is the perfect embodiment of the poetics of the ‘Life is a Game’ project: if living and playing are one and the same (Huizinga), then it is only through play that a toy becomes real. Plato reiterates this in *The Laws* – man is merely a toy fashioned by the gods, and this is his finest quality – and Pinocchio is the secular votive offering: a wooden nose, a tin heart, a puppet who defiles his very own nature in order to truly live.
From Collodi’s Italy to the Tokyo of ‘Balocchi Elettrici’, the puppet crosses seas and centuries and is reincarnated in manga, yellowed paper and kawaii: wood and neon, West and East, childhood memories and a metropolis on the verge of exploding.
Because the only ‘serious’ game is that of children, and we, like them, will continue to play forever.
Akira Zakamoto is one of Luca Motolese’s heteronyms: autonomous and parallel identities, each with its own biography and voice, disparate chapters of the same apocalyptic journey. Akira has never grown up: he sees angels where others see streetlamps; he paints indigo children, fairy tales and blue traffic lights, convinced that the future is merely a postponed childhood. In his paintings, the sacred and the pop clash – ancient deities and cartoon heroes on the same altarpiece, set within an electric metropolis on the verge of exploding.
For him, life is, first and foremost, a game: an open world with an open outcome, one that you simply cannot lose.
This event is part of
- TorinoFrom 07/11/2026 to 31/01/2027