⤳ Strong wind events foster leaning trees
⤳ HYPOGEA: Beneath the light of days, different rhythms flow
⤳ HYPOGEA: Beneath the light of days, different rhythms flow
Scattered notes on a place
Ongoing research and artistic project, initiated while discovering an artillery bunker in the forest around Skatanniemi, Helsinki, which was built for defense purposes during the First World War, was never used, and today is resting there. Water permeates the concrete and, with time, beautiful calthemites (the kind of stalactites that grow from concrete) are growing.
The project in its current form is being developed across a short film, a photographic series, but also text, drawing, and other mediums. The work is mainly centered around the the concept of safety, around the entity of the bunker, of the cave, and of the burrow; safety as defense, when safe becomes sheltered, defense as action and as reaction. And, also, in the concept of access points: calthemites and abandoned concrete structures form access points towards both history and present sorrow. A puddle, either a real one or a vessel-like sculpture within the Cave, might act as an access point, or even portal, for an underground, probably different, perhaps opposite reality.
Film preview
Currently in research & development
Scattered notes
2023A text, a score.
Double-sided inkjet print on Keaykolour Particles paper, "snow" and “moonlight”, 148x420 cm
You might add an organic texture
2023
Photographic print mounted on dibond, 64x48 cm
Underground models
2023 — Exploring the delicate balance between natural occurrences and intentional design, ‘Underground Models’ is a project that immerses itself in mycelium’s own agency as an entity, model, and framework.
A model is a simplified representation used to understand, analyse, design, or simulate a system, to make predictions or gain insights. Albeit with regional variations, what multiple cultures have in common is a fascination towards fungi, those elusive yet fascinating species. As current research attempts to make use of mycology and its intrinsic structures in order to pursue sustainability, what can we still learn through observation? What have we been learning, and imagining, so far? And can these endeavours act for us as an accurate mirror?
Alongside research, it’s conceptualised as an art installation, featuring a circular sculptural element, referecing pixie rings, made of segments of Reishi mushroom mycelium; and a looping short film drawing visual and conceptual parallels between mycelium hyphae growth, water-spores interactions, and how meanings and readings are generated, recalled, perpetuated.
Project ideated within the Funken program/residency.
Initial development in 2023 supported by Funken Academy, founded by Klub Solitaer e.V and partners Fraunhofer IWU & ENAS, WRO Art Center, Ars Electronica.
Many thanks to Noor Stenfert Kroese for the mentoring within the Funken Academy program.
Initial fungi labwork carried out at Fraunhofer IWU (Dresden, Germany) and at Ars Electronica BioLab (Linz, Austria).
Sound design by Matteo Dian.
Film preview:
Underground models, Excerpt 2, audio
Sometimes, caused by fairies or elves dancing in a circle.
If humans joined the dance they would be punished, and they would dance until exhaustion.
Sometimes, dragons are to blame. They use their fiery tails to burn them,
forever inscribed into the forest floor. Fire circles.
Sometimes, rather witches rings. Where witches dance together,
and dance on Walpurgis night, six months before Halloween.
Sometimes, portals to another world. If you step in, you are transported,
sometimes upside down. Sometimes forever trapped.
Sometimes, just a dinner table. For fairies company only, you shouldn’t join.
Yet the table expands each year, as new guests approach.
Sometimes, good luck for you. It means fairies are nearby,
their village underground. The neighbours you wished for.
👆︎
The circular sculptural element references pixie/fairy/witches/... rings,
and is made of segments of Reishi mushrooms mycelium.
photo: Johannes Richter
installation view from Funken at Villa Rosenberg, Chemnitz DE, 2023
still going
2022still going is a series of photographic works suggesting a story about escaping, hiding, resisting. Beginning with a fondness for prop making, it’s developed by creating objects (somewhere in between votive objects and relics) and employing photography as a narrative tool.
Nido (Nest)
2021
noi limpidissimi ma scorretti! ed ogni superficie è qui
us, very limpid but unfair! and every surface is here
For the substantial difference between seeking and creating a nest.
And all of the journeys, and the tunnels, in between. From duvet forts and pillow fights and hot glue resembling insects and how blessed to have a garden, a real garden, in these awfully trying times. The secret garden. The key. Votive imaginery to show: here, this is where we’ve been waiting.
photo: Giulia Guidi
installation view at the double-solo E domani? Domani nevica at Spazio Giacomo, Bergamo IT, 2021
installation view at the double-solo E domani? Domani nevica at Spazio Giacomo, Bergamo IT, 2021
Per ogni nostra diffrazione notturna (For each of our nocturnal diffraction)
2021Single channel 4K video, colour, sound, 9’33’’
Short film that explores fragments of a circumscribed ecological setting surfacing as dreamlike visions during a series of repeated nocturnal explorations. These scenes, flashlight-aided and AI-enhanced, reveal the blending and intra-acting of observed and observing presences in a frenzy of particles that coexist, everlasting, each night.
It stems from research on material interconnections, and in particular from the exploration of a place - a place I lived in for 11 years, and which I consider my hometown in Italy - the agricultural environment along the Adda river; and from a conception of this place as a system that welcomes within itself a coexistence of different yet interconnected entities.
This investigation was carried out through a series of frequent nightly walks in the area that continued for over five months, as I slowly learned how to inhabit the environment in a way that made my presence known but not overwhelming. The soundtrack features a rework of the ambient sounds from the original footage and my own vocal tics.
The filming process was for me a balancing act between different presences. Instead of installing cameras, I decided to be physically there. The animals in the area are not used to humans, and they will run and hide as soon as they hear you approaching. That meant learning how to walk, and film, slowly and silently; to be almost absent in order to record a presence.
registro.log
2020Single channel HD video, colour, sound, 3’29’’
registro.log is a short film that stems from research on memory, linked interactions and the materiality of digital traces. Its starting point is the analysis of chatlogs from personal messaging systems created in the spring of 2020. A window, its elements and its surroundings are elected as a place of contemplation, contact point between the self and the other, shown along the natural recorded sounds from the outside world.
Coinciding with early pandemic strict lockdown in northern Italy, the exchanged messages offer a window into how, despite physically bound, reality - or even, realities - can transcend, through the digital and beyond. Despite the peculiar and specific time frame that acted as a starting point, the film doesn’t reference specific elements from that period; but rather, it concentrates on its material qualities: both of the real window (the glass, the curtain, the reflections) and of a rich database of chatlogs. And, rather than underlining contrasts within this dualism, it’s an observation of their coexistence.
Somewhere between these two realms - the physical and the digital, the body standing and filming by the window and the voice expressed through text only - something else might emerge.