Matthias Odin:

CIMA

French Place

Milan, Italy

curated by Marta Orsola

 

Text by Arnold Braho

 

We find ourselves in the era of operational images: a visual regime in which the distance between the concrete experience of war and its representation has taken on a new and now structural form. This condition was anticipated by the reflections of Harun Farocki, who conceived operational images as visions produced within a technical system. Essentially, it is now accepted that a growing portion of the recordings that structure our perception of the world today is no longer produced by the human gaze, but generated by technical devices such as sensors, satellites, simulators, and algorithmic systems, which process and exchange visual information within automatic processes. Rather than representing the world, these images generate it. They record and anticipate events, elaborate scenarios, and produce operational data.

 

The characteristics of operational images are those of showing the beginning and the end of a circumstance, its execution or outcome, while tending to omit what occurs in the temporal fragment between one event and another. They arrive as determinations of reality already in motion, functional recordings of an event that takes place at the very moment it is processed by the device. In this process, everything that makes that event possible, both the infrastructures, logistical chains, and material and industrial stages, remains off-screen. If operational images are generated by machines to act within technical systems, the perception of conflict becomes mediated almost exclusively by these visual flows. Everything that happens outside this gaze—such as the network of objects, infrastructures, archives, industrial traces, and everyday lives—remains invisible between one image and another.

 

It is precisely within this field of traces that the work of Matthias Odin is situated. The exhibition CIMA (Cartellino Identificazione Materiale Anonimo) begins with the discovery, in an abandoned factory in Milan, of some crates and technical maps linked to the production of Oerlikon-Bührle. These are industrial containers that very likely transported or stored components of armaments produced by the Swiss company, which was active for decades in the manufacture of military devices and munitions, including in Italy.

 

The logic underlying Odin’s practice is that of détournement: objects conceived for a military function are here removed from their original context and reactivated as elements of a critical visual and conceptual experience. CASSA N.1. ANIMA (2026) opens the exhibition, and the series of structures displayed in the first room of French Place—probably intended for the transport of industrial materials linked to armament production—become here carriers of meaning, points of intersection between industrial history, conflict, and material memory. Their structural qualities, the rigidity of the wood, and the traces of transport and wear stage a critical residue: what remains between one event and another, between one operational image and another. Each crate, despite its apparent anonymity, thus conveys the layering of functions and temporalities, inviting the viewer to confront what normally remains invisible in the logistics, production, and perception of war. What materialistic legacy do they leave today for our understanding of the contemporary?

 

Odin’s operation is not limited to objects: it also assumes a psychogeographic dimension, exploring abandoned factories and hidden industrial spaces that exist alongside us but remain inaccessible. Through assemblage, the artist inserts industrial drawings, technical diagrams, and informational systems that we are not given the means to analyze, making visible a level of reality that normally remains opaque. Odin’s practice brings to light what a regime of operational visibility tends to suppress or render unknowable, opening a space in which it is possible to rethink the relationship between material events and their political configurations. In the second room, technical drawings float within plexiglass structures: Found Copper Luce Reparto (2026), 10.02.89 (2026), and Raccordo R=30 Possibile (2026). These works isolate details and components like specimens to be observed, suggesting a careful, almost investigative gaze into the functioning of technical systems and their origins, without reducing them to a purely scientific reading. The only information available to the viewer resides in the titles themselves, which become the sole clues for navigating these suspended objects.

 

Finally, Odin’s collages extend this logic: technical drawings overlaid on vintage photographs of industrial instruments are interrupted by black marks, which erase some information while emphasizing others. The two works thus present themselves as a reflection on selection and amnesia, highlighting how technical memory, history, and perception are also constructed through omissions, erasures, and isolated details. The attempt to explain one form of repression through another.

 

I look at these tar spot, and the phrase “Le fond de l’air est noir” comes to mind, recalling the opening scene of Chris Marker’s documentary A Grin Without a Cat. It is 1977, and here the text appears next to a blot of color on the screen, while Marker reuses archival materials and documentary sequences to offer the viewer a critical commentary—that is, his power. The film intertwines images of global wars, leftist movements, uprisings, and repression in an editing that shows how promises of social transformation could xexist “in the air,” but were hardly realizable in concrete reality. In my memory, the phrase stands out against the background as a warning, yet now I feel that the same admonition returns, albeit with a different resonance. Today’s political context reverberates through the images, but the echo is confused, filtered: seeing is no longer enough to understand.

 

In this sense, CIMA by Matthias Odin is a continuous invitation to interrogate the space between what we see and what we comprehend. To remember that “historical reality cannot be grasped except through a complicated process of mediation that allows consciousness to recognize one moment in another, its purpose and action in its destiny, its destiny in its purpose and action, its essence in this necessity.”