In conceiving an exhibition that would follow a particular residency situation in which we were able to invite four other artists from three different countries to come to this foreign city (Milan) for consecutive (sometimes overlapping) periods of individual production, one curatorial assumption we started with was that communication signals would at times slip, distort, or vaporize. We didn’t want total exchangeability. We’re referring to the global art trade here: a supposedly flat arena where different subjectivities fall into alignment under some quasi-shared rubric of artistic value. For us, the romantic conceptualization of communicative slippage and the political urge to amplify the noise of the excluded together formed a kind of strangled, helix-shaped premise. We wanted to push the artwork’s ability to index the texture of exchange, as it occurs through chains of conversion from data to material, language to code. We didn’t want to smooth over the mess.