Brutalism lands at Pitti: Leschelier’s installation in Florence

There is something profoundly archaic yet radically contemporary in Ancient/New Site, the monumental site-specific installation created by architect and sculptor Marc Leschelier in the central courtyard of the Fortezza da Basso in Florence, on the occasion of Pitti Immagine Uomo 109, taking place from January 13 to 16, 2026.

Curated by designer Philéo Landowski, guest curator of Pitti Immagine’s Arte Programme 2026, the work spans 1,700 square meters and unfolds through eighteen imposing structures—five meters high, three meters wide, and nine meters deep—arranged in space like a lithic constellation that speaks a layered language rich in cultural and symbolic references. The evocation of Stonehenge is subtle yet powerful: by reducing architecture to its essential components, Leschelier is able explore the ideas of threshold and enclosure, allowing a ritual dimension to surface, one that seems to emerge from an ancestral collective memory.

The monoliths are constructed using scaffolding systems clad in concrete canvas, a material capable of bringing contrasting forces and sensibilities into dialogue. Originally developed for infrastructural applications—from slope stabilisation to ground reinforcement—concrete canvas hardens within a few hours once moistened, transforming into a compact mineral mass. Here it takes on the malleability of a hybrid material, halfway between textile and cement, perfectly embodying the tension at the core of the artist’s research: between informal gesture and contemporary engineering, between constructive immediacy and geometric rigour.

In tune with the universe of Pitti Uomo, Ancient/New Site is not an object to be contemplated from afar. On the contrary, it invites the public to enter it, traverse it, and use it as a spatial device to access the exhibition spaces below. Scale becomes a tool for establishing a relationship between the body and architecture, a human measure within a monumental composition. An artificial landscape that does not impose a path but rather suggests one, allowing the body—before the gaze—to negotiate its own relationship with form.

The rejection of architecture in its most traditional function is a cornerstone of Leschelier’s practice. The French artist, who lives and works in Paris, refers to his works as “pre-architectures”: structures freed from urbanistic logic and instead endowed with an immediacy typical of performance art; alternative construction systems aimed at intercepting primary forms and typologies in order to return them to the present charged with renewed symbolic intensity. In this sense, the installation for Pitti Uomo 109 appears as a ruin in reverse: not what remains of a building, but what precedes architecture itself.