The artist originally from Vicenza with an engineering background uses his art to explore the mechanical behaviour and physical and material properties of forces in equilibrium. The Paris installation is explosive: a machine that runs on compressed nitrogen launches beer bottles (a reference to pop culture as well as the urban environment) against a wall at a speed of 600 kilometres per hour. Every day 120 bottles are hurled at random, totalling 6,000 bottles in three months. At the end of the exhibition they will have become a mountain of broken glass. In the words of the artist, “I don’t want to create images but a state of things in tension, which I try to construct using the pressure, weight and sound produced by the friction of masses.” Afasia 1 is the first piece in a new series on the question of aphasia (the partial or total loss of the ability to speak) and the suspension of language. Elena Sommariva

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