In the past two years, my studio has partly migrated inside a mountain. To be more precise – inside a hydroelectric plant built inside a mountain, a fascist architectural project conceived during Italy’s autarkic economic programme of the 1930s and designed specifically for Mussolini’s inauguration of the project. The plant formed part of a broader ideology of economic self-sufficiency, transforming the force of the beautiful turquoise Slovenian Soča River into electrical power that would sustain industrial growth, territorial control and the political ambitions of Fascist Italy. It was an architecture designed to colonise Slovenian nature and subject it to fascist sovereignty.

Being able to enter this architecture and unpack my time and studio bags within its monumental marble-clad control room made me think about the continuous use and abuse of art and culture throughout history – as pawns in the permutations of national stage-setting, and as those repeatedly called upon to construct and enthrone its subsequent spectacles of power. Power can only take shape when it is filled with images, symbols and representations, yet the very people whose labour sustains it are often those it sacrifices first.

There is a growing awareness that the conditions under which art is produced can no longer be separated from the systems that sustain – or withdraw support from – its existence. Across much of the world, art and culture are repeatedly positioned as luxuries that can no longer be afforded. Faced with geopolitical instability, military rearmament, energy insecurity and economic stagnation, governments increasingly frame cultural production as secondary to more urgent forms of expenditure.

The language is familiar: difficult choices, necessary sacrifices, strategic priorities, human survival. In this equation, art and culture are often the easiest things to cut, precisely because soft power cannot be measured in megawatts. The softer the power, the faster the cut. This rhetoric is not new. Variations of it can be traced back to ancient Sparta and ancient Rome’s Lex Oppia, where periods of crisis were used to justify restrictions on public display, cultural expression, foreign art and perceived excess.

The photographs presented here document a period spent thinking about power and its residues, and about the conditions of artistic production as a form of energy that drives social discourse, generates critical thought and sustains the economies of knowledge and care inherited from our predecessors.

This fascist hydroelectric plant became both my workplace and a driving allegory for the material and ideological infrastructures that shape what societies choose to value. Its turbines, conduits and control rooms offered a material record of the extraction of energy and a seamless metaphor for the forms of extraction that have historically underwritten cultural production. The resonance of this choreography of power prompted the development of a film in which the architecture of the plant functions as a stage upon which I was able to merge historical and contemporary arguments for the culling of art and culture in the name of public responsibility. The survival of humanity has sadly always been an alibi of tyrants.

The plant’s original logic – transforming natural forces into political power – provides a metaphorical framework through which to consider how contemporary states manage culture through the allocation, restriction and withdrawal of resources, as well as through the creation of conditions in which self-censorship becomes so complete that the system no longer needs to enforce it.

The result is a gradual erosion that never announces itself as censorship. Instead, it arrives through budgets, administrative reforms, strategic reviews and the quiet disappearance of spaces in which dissent, imagination and alternative futures might be rehearsed. That disappearance includes many artists’ studios as well.

Within this context, the artist’s studio can no longer be understood as an isolated room of (thought) production. The urgent question now is: What forms of cultural power remain possible when the structures that sustain them are themselves being dismantled? The photographs trace this tension: between energy and attention, infrastructure and imagination, production and disappearance. They ask what happens when a society continues to invest in generating of power while progressively withdrawing support from the spaces in which that power might be questioned.

Yet I also found a new organism capable of sustaining the resilience an artist’s practice requires. The tamers of the river gave me access and shut down the turbines so that we could once again listen to the sound of the belly of the mountain and learn from it. It spoke to us in a mother tongue, a language of belonging rather than command. One that promises new life from its fractured past. It is within this togetherness that other futures may still be rehearsed.