Installations: Artist’s Statement

2023

«What is the place?»
«The road. The home. The heart».
(Martin Buber, Gog e Magog, ed. Neri Pozza, 1999)

 

In my public art practice, I am particularly responsive to the spirit of places and the exploration of their physical identities and social values. I strongly believe that art should be experienced where we happen to be because of the circumstances, choices and occurrences of our everyday lives.

I wish to help people enjoy what they see and experience. Their perception and awareness of the new visual and sensory relations with the environment becomes part of the art work, increasing individual mindfulness and welfare. Offering a different perception of the urban spaces, they see with new eyes what has been designed for purely functional purposes, transforming an often-uninviting space into one that encourages and excites.

Seeking my inspiration from the reality of the places, I envision a transformative experience that belongs to the specific space where the installation is conceived, responding to the cultural and architectural personality that a place can convey, so that the overlooked, the ordinary and the familiar are made extraordinary and dynamic. I am particularly interested is spaces of transition, crossing and intersection, for everything that connects and separates.  This leads me not to negate or conceal the actual nature of places, but rather affirm their transformation to augment imagination and collective benefit.

Halfway through the 1980s, after years of experimentation with the medium of photography, I needed to engage real space and move beyond purely two-dimensional representations of places. I sought to make the invisible visible, to reveal identity by capturing and subtracting, re-placing and modifying aspects of the locations, attributing their meanings through a process of appropriation and transformation. This practice has helped me to develop a sense of identity, necessity, and belonging so that I could become part of them.

Every space has its own spirit. It exists prior to my reconnaissance and will continue to be after my passage. Once marked and charged with a symbolic significance, each place becomes the station of a voyage that connects all the ones I encountered and recognized before. My personal experience and the physical place will be inseparably connected, and the space becomes the event.