Mario Cucinella creates a work for Arte Sella, merging new and ancient technologies

Founded in the 1980s by a group of artists, Arte Sella is one of the oldest land art parks in Italy. With three exhibition routes - the Villa Strobele Garden, the Montura Trail and the Malga Costa area - the park has been acquiring an international work annually since 1986, created site-specific and inserted in a harmonious dialogue with the mountain landscape of Trentino.   To the architects and artists who have enriched this mountain over the years - including Kengo Kuma, Michele de Lucchi, Atsushi Kitagawara, Eduardo Souto de Moura and Stefano Boeri - this year is joined by Mario Cucinella with Discrete Landscape: an installation made by robotic arm, which reinterprets one of the oldest construction techniques in Europe. An intervention suspended between art and architecture, firmly anchored in the productive and cultural flows of the territory. 

Between the use of new technologies and the rediscovery of unobtrusive building traditions, Discrete Landscape is a self-supporting installation, located on the bank of a stream in the Montura Trail route, reminiscent of basaltic columns, those that in nature are formed when a lava flow suddenly cools.

A robotic arm built it by 3D printing and layering slurries made of natural lime, rice husk ash and some residual Tonalite dell'Adamello, a Trentino rock, supplied by the company Graniti Pedretti, with no commercial value. The fine-tuning of the materials is due to the collaboration between Calchèra San Giorgio (Grigno Valsugana) and the Politecnico di Milano, and was also worth the filing of a patent on the different formulations, while the blocks were made by Erratic (Valdagno). The printing technology is produced in-house.

415 blocks, therefore, that stand up without using mortars and binders, mimicking a very ancient tradition that draws on and gives back to the territory its own materials. Nothing new, really, in the career of Cucinella, who in 2015 founded the School of Sustainability, and with his studio between Bologna and Milan is increasingly thinking about projects with a strong community drive and in line with environmental needs. On Domus just this year we had mentioned the Fila pavilion, designed by the studio to revitalize Bologna's Montagnola Park.


The result of this long experimentation with local raw materials is a porous texture that makes this column chromatically sedimented and similar to the limestones of the valley, as if it had been deposited there for a long time. On the other hand, the additive printing technique brings the installation back perfectly in line with the architectural present: it contains production waste to a minimum and makes the work demountable and completely reversible.  Discrete Landscape will be visible inside the Arte Sella park from September 26, 2025. 

Opening image: Mario Cucinella. Photo Julius Hirtzberger