Now Bodies

Now Bodies, Rafaela Mascaro

Digital and generative art | Artificial intelligence

Brazilian artist Rafaela Mascaro has created the visual identity for Maintenant 2026. Entitled Now Bodies, it unfolds as an ecosystem of sentient creatures, building on her ‘Gang Friends’ universe. These characters, with their shifting identities that oscillate between the familiar and the strange, challenge our relationship with the present. An organic and colourful creation to be discovered in its animated version at the Théâtre du Vieux St-Étienne.

The aesthetic of Now Bodies maintains a constant tension between intimacy and theatricality. Saturated, almost artificial colours create a hazy visual world, halfway between gentleness, strangeness and hyperreality. In this creative process, artificial intelligence acts as a tool for experimentation in the service of artistic expression: it complements Rafaela Mascaro’s vision without ever replacing it, allowing the images to fully embrace their ambiguity, straddling the line between the real and the imaginary.

Rafaela Mascaro blurs the boundaries of gender, age and status to reveal our identities as they truly are: fluid, multifaceted and interconnected. It is from this zone of ambiguity that a sensitive and thoroughly contemporary interpretation of our relationship with technology, representations and identities emerges. Hybrid by nature, these figures pose a very simple question: what if the strange were nothing more than what we have not yet allowed ourselves to see?