DASH — CAO FEI AT FONDAZIONE PRADA, MILAN

Images courtesy of Fondazione Prada

Technology, Land, and Future

At its Milan headquarters, Fondazione Prada presents Dash, a new multimedia project by Cao Fei, on view from 9 April to 28 September 2026. Developed over three years of field research across southern and northwestern China and Southeast Asia, the exhibition grows from a simple yet urgent observation: agriculture—humanity’s oldest system of survival—is quietly undergoing a technological revolution.

Cao Fei shifts her lens from factories and logistical infrastructures, long central to her practice, toward the fields. Here, drones hover above rice paddies, algorithms calculate harvest cycles, and satellite systems guide planting routes. Efficiency increases, labor shifts, and food security is recalibrated. Yet beneath this progress lies a deeper question—what happens to memory, ritual, and the human rhythm of the land when intelligence becomes automated?

Presented by Interni Cipta Selaras

Through photography, documentary footage, immersive video installations, archival materials, and virtual reality, Dash unfolds as a layered narrative of “agricultural techno-globalization.” It neither glorifies nor condemns technology. Instead, it lingers in the tension between innovation and inheritance.

As stated by Cao Fei:

“This exhibition invites viewers to step into a contemporary agricultural archaeological site, where multiple temporal dimensions intertwine. It is not a pastoral idyll of technology, but an archaeological gaze upon ‘agriculture as geological engineering.’ Here, satellite positioning systems converse with ritual geographies; artificial intelligence and traditional experience train one another; historical images and sensor signals generate visual resonance. Together, these objects and images form a chronicle of technological artifacts—at once tools of production and carriers of time—continually reconfiguring the biopolitics of the land across the vast gradients of human history.”

The exhibition occupies both floors of the Podium, transforming the space into an immersive terrain. Designed by Small Production, the installation includes a grain warehouse, a new farmer station, a temple-like tent woven from fertilizer bags, and a banana plantation surrounded by smart agricultural equipment and solar panels. The atmosphere feels at once industrial and devotional.

Inside the grain warehouse, the newly commissioned film Dash unfolds across split screens, tracing the choreography between farmers and machines. As art critic Yang Beichen notes:

“In Dash, we can clearly sense the artist’s attempt to register the distinctive rhythms of machines… The drone, with its algorithms and visual system, is no longer just a device at humans’ disposal, but becomes part of a ‘cognitive assemblage.’”

Elsewhere, The Birth stages a three-channel video installation inspired by Southeast Asian rituals in which drones are offered prayers for abundant harvests—suggesting that even in a mechanized age, faith persists. In Dash-180c, a virtual reality work, visitors inhabit the perspective of a discarded drone, drifting through a speculative future shaped entirely by automation.

Upstairs, documentaries, interviews, archival posters, scientific slides, and historical materials place today’s smart farming within a broader cultural continuum—from mid-20th-century nation-building narratives to the Reform and Opening-up era. The journey culminates in Cao Fei’s conceptual diagram CHT Triad: Cosmos, Human, Technics, proposing not domination but coexistence.

With Dash, Cao Fei invites a quieter reflection. If technology is now inseparable from daily life, perhaps the question is no longer whether it will transform us—but how we might still remain connected to land, memory, and one another within it.