Behind the wall, part 1
(City playground, chapter 3)
spherical sections - 2019
conical sections - 2019
These are the very first two images of the third chapter of the City playground project.
It is not unusual, when watching the outline of city buildings, to spot blind facades. These surfaces grabbed my interest: what material would come to light when removing the thin layer of plaster? What would those walls hide? I then investigate the consistency of buildings in the centre of Rome. Here I chose to perform the editing by subtracting rather than by adding, as with previous chapters, with a Boolean operation: I subtracted elementary geometrical shapes – the cone and the sphere – to the consistency of the facade thus generating circular and elliptical profiles that witness the presence of invisible solids. I was inspired by the works of the American artist and anarchitect Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) who chose buildings destined to demolition to draw precise cuts on architectural organisms thus reaching a stratigraphic and kaleidoscopic reading of the whole structure.
Through a manual and conceptual work I have dematerialized the construction organism by building with real LEGO bricks some hypothetical introspective views. The result is a demolition through a construction, a negative with a positive.
Through the use of black and white, the material gets more evident thus facilitating the observer in the process of abstraction.
During the lockdown period in 2020 spent at home I found the time to play with LEGO bricks and the proper inspiration to continue the series “behind the wall”.
The events occurred in the last decades (pollution, terrorism, financial crisis and now pandemic) are questioning the concept of overcentralizing city. In the work "piazza dell'oro" the blind carved wall is a silent and ignored relic of the demolitions made in the past century to fit the small Renaissance streets of Rome to massive car traffic.
piazza dell'oro - 2020
facing the Colosseum #1 - 2020
facing the Colosseum #2 - 2020
