Presented by Michele Colonna – Colonna Contemporary
The question De-Construction asks is not whether technology is remaking the world. It is whether we are building differently, or dismantling more than we realize.
click to enlarge
In a new body of work, the Brussels-based digital artist EdgeStretching, Benedetta Mucchi, places oversized excavators, wrecking balls, and drilling rigs inside recognizable European streets. The machines dig, demolish, and rebuild. They read as tools, as efficiency, as command over the physical world. Set against cities layered with architectural and cultural memory, that command turns uncertain. It is never clear whether the machines are clearing the ground to prepare something or to erase it.
Each image begins as the artist’s own location photography, shot on a Sony A7 III in European cities,
then layered with heavy machinery generated in Midjourney, ChatGpt and Gemini and composited in Photoshop.
Mucchi uses real types of equipment, exaggerating scale or shifting a single detail, so the scenes stay anchored in something that could be true. The work refuses to separate what was documented from what was constructed. That refusal is the point. Contemporary life depends on systems, technical, energy, economic, digital, that we use and trust without fully understanding how they operate. De-Construction makes that dependence visible at the scale of a city block.
The project began with unease. Watching heavy equipment work a public square in Brussels, Mucchi saw in its force a concrete expression of a wider condition, where familiar structures suggest control yet hold the capacity to transform their surroundings beyond recognition. War, power struggles, energy pressure, and technological acceleration had begun to converge.
De-Construction is what that discomfort looks like when it is given scale.
The work has been released as on-chain editions on July 3, 2026 on Verse. The collection comprises eleven digital stills and two videos, produced between September 2024 and May 2026 from 876 source photographs and 281 selected generations.
Two works, Crawler Excavator and Wrecking Ball, include 80 × 45 cm fine art prints.
EdgeStretching will direct twenty percent of the primary net proceeds to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, in support of the #WomanLifeFreedom movement for human rights and democracy in Iran.
Michele Colonna
Wrecking Ball and Crawler Excavator – fine art prints (80 × 45 cm) are available here, other subjects upon request.
