Ginevra Petrozzi reclaims witchcraft as a tool against surveillance capitalism, using enchantment and ritual to resist technological control. Designing performative interactions and installations, she raises awareness of how our online behaviours shape our lives, and our notion of the future. Drawing on Italian folk traditions, clandestinely passed down through generations of women, she blends the magical with everyday existence, specifically our interactions with devices. Rather than designing objects and assigning functions to them, she envisions objects as magical allies, imbued with the power to shape worlds. Through her interdisciplinary approach, she designs spaces for social change and reconnects us with the ineffable. Ginevra also reflects on predictive systems and our urge to control the future, suggesting that despite the semblance of techno capitalism to a fate-like system, individuals can reclaim agency over their own destinies.

Inspired by the question of what it might mean to be a “digital witch,” Ginevra’s work explores answers in the face of uncertainty and the risks associated with our responses to the unknown. She reconsiders the potential of divination as a means to reclaim agency in an era dominated by Big Data. Ginevra graduated from Social Design at  Design Academy Eindhoven with Digital Esoterism. The project blends installation and performance, offering smartphone-based tarot readings to challenge the myth of individual agency under algorithmic governance. Ginevra critiques how predictive technologies like analytics, algorithms, and artificial intelligence shape signs we encounter daily.  In a digitally regulated cosmos, technologies have now assumed the role of fate-makers. In BOMTYCC (Bite Off More Than You Can Chew) she creates a dialogue between two predictive methods that seem to dictate individual fates: facial recognition software and ancient systems of somatic divination. She links her orthodontic treatment with tooth divination, using a neural network trained to interpret changes in her bite as changes in her destiny. The project argues how both ancient and modern systems of prediction tend to fixate the future, limiting individual autonomy.

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