Marble matters– exploring Carrara’s legacy
Sixteen young international architects took part in two intensive training days in Carrara, organized by FUM Academy and YACademy, featuring visits to the marble quarries and a design workshop focused on the use of the material.
By means of his sculptures, installations, videos and performances, the artist puts into action continuous mechanisms of audience disorientation: the "artifice" (or the trickery) is, now and then, absurdly pronounced, or highlighted, in order to attract the attention on something or someone who, otherwise, would remain unknown. In The Stray Man, 2006, for instance, a performance also presented at the Galleria Civica in 2006, an ordinary attitude of a man without any eccentricity, looking from outside through a window into the exhibition space where the artist has been invited to display his works, turns into a repeated action which, thanks to this repetition at regular intervals, increases the audience's curiosity.
Probably the most striking example is Loop, the title of the big installation presented at the 53rd Venice Biennale, when he transformed the pavilion in a way so that the audience could not notice the difference between the interior and the exterior, between the gardens surrounding the building and the interior hall of the building. Thanks to the collaboration with some horticulturists working in the Biennale Gardens, Ondák created a garden inside the pavilion: he moved natural reality into an artificial exhibition area by operating on visitors' perception who did not realize at first they had crossed a physical and symbolic threshold, separating the open space/time of nature from the closed space/time of art. Only afterwards the audience's gaze became aware of the architectural nature of the pavilion and the intimate contiguity (loop) between opposite elements (interior/exterior; nature/culture).
In the ground floor of the Fondazione, Ondák presents a series of works mainly made in the 90s and never exhibited in public until now. The project concludes in the underground areas of the museum where Eclipse (2011) is presented, a new site-specific project expressly designed for the architectural space of the Fondazione and that turns it, literally, inside out. The work, which concludes the exhibition path, representing its spectacular aesthetical condensation, consists in the overturning of the basement ceiling of the Fondazione, realized with salvaged materials of the ceiling and larch wood belonging to the forestry property of Trentino region and generally used for the construction of roofs. As in the most part of the artist's works, also in this case the effect is equivocal, due to the contrasts and analogies of the work. Eclipse is not only the reversal of the exhibition area's ceiling, which, instead of rising up toward the sky, sinks into the ground, but it is also a common roof, with tiles and chimneys: an architectural aporia, the more ambiguous, the more realistic, where what was high becomes low, what was external becomes interior, a closed and concluded place, an archeological legacy in a contemporary museum space. An apex (upside down) with which the search for a fantastic way through the real architecture of the museum reaches its peak, with a playful tone which almost turns into a fairy tale.
Until 8 May 2011
Roman Ondák, Eclipse
Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento
Design and ceramics renew a shopping center
FMG Fabbrica Marmi and architect Paolo Gianfrancesco, of THG Arkitektar Studio, have designed the restyling of the third floor of Reykjavik's largest shopping center. Ceramic, the central element of the project, covers floors, walls and furniture with versatile solutions and distinctive character.