NEW YORK - s4story -- 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.

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 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.

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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 releases 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.

About EdgeStretching

EdgeStretching is the pseudonym of Benedetta Mucchi, an Italian digital artist based in Brussels. Trained in computer graphics and animation at UCLA, with two decades in the audio-visual sector, she began developing her own work in 2016 and moved into on-chain photography in 2023. In 2025 she was selected for HUG's 100 Photographers to Watch, curated by National Geographic photographers John Knopf and Michael Yamashita. Her work has shown in Brussels, Paris, Rome, Kyoto, Chicago, and Tokyo, and across public screen networks from Times Square to Hong Kong, Melbourne, and hundreds of displays across Belgium.

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About Colonna Contemporary

Colonna Contemporary is a curatorial studio for AI-driven and digital art, producing exhibitions, limited releases, and ongoing curatorial projects, building context around practices that have shifted from the periphery to the center of how art is made, seen, and collected.

Media Contact

Michele Colonna

michele@colonnacontemporary.com

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