The Completion Office, a multi-media installation conceived and curated by Sebastian Alvarez, places Saint Michael’s College in conversation with the village of Fontecchio, Italy. Alvarez currently lives and works in Fontecchio, a community with a population of 300 in Italy’s mountainous Abruzzo region.

Alvarez will be in residence at SMC for three weeks producing work for his October 2026 McCarthy Art Gallery show. He will explore the Edmundite phase of “completion.” In both Abruzzo and Vermont, continuity depends on a negotiation between what institutions can provide and what people must learn to sustain together, a question made more urgent as our inherited structures, technologies, and forms of authority change rapidly.

Edmundite completion offers both communities an unusual angle for approaching a problem that fascinates Alvarez: not how to preserve everything indefinitely, but how to recognize limits, transfer responsibility, and decide what deserves another form of life.

He envisions The Completion Office as serving a temporary function. It creates space for a small group of artists whose works ask what happens when authorship, expertise, judgment, and responsibility can increasingly be delegated, simulated, or automated.

Biography: Sebastian Alvarez is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker born in Lima, Peru, and currently based in Abruzzo, Italy. There, he has participated in and co-facilitated community-based projects involving longtime residents and newcomers. These experiences have increasingly shaped a practice concerned with the interrelations and ruptures between living systems, built environments, institutions, and collective life. His research-based work takes the form of film, installation, infographics, performative lectures, sound, and experimental music. He produced and co-wrote the award-winning documentary A Machine to Live In, which examines the relationship between state power, architecture, mysticism, and utopian community-making in Brazil, and is currently developing a hybrid documentary in the Peruvian Andes on extractivism and its social and environmental consequences within the global economy. Alvarez has taught and lectured at the San Francisco Art Institute and facilitated workshops and performances at San Quentin State Prison. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented across museums, galleries, public spaces, cultural institutions, and international film festivals, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, Townhouse Gallery, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art Bourges, and Wiener Festwochen.

Sebastian Alvarez Website