Edoardo Tresoldi has unveiled Simbiosi”, his new site-specific artwork for Arte Sella sculpture park, the renowned open air museum in Italy’s Trentino Valley. For over 30 years, Arte Sella has intertwined nature and art thanks to artworks by internationally acclaimed artists and architects such as Eduardo Souto de Moura, Kengo Kuma, Michele De Lucchi, and Ettore Sottsass.
Tresoldi’s research, focused on the experiential perception of the space and the relationship with the landscape’s elements, moves ahead through a sculptural and emotional interpenetration between architecture and nature. “Simbiosi” is a turning point in the Italian artist’s evolution: for the first time, Tresoldi hybridizes the transparency of absent matter, expressed through the wire mesh, with the materiality of local stones.
Entirely open towards the sky and reaching a height of 5 meters, “Simbiosi” composes a space for rest and contemplation, a ruin suspended between architecture, nature, and the temporal dimension.
The artwork seems to challenge the force of gravity, like a body in suspension that levitates between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the material and immaterial world. A living organism, permeable yet intimate: an emotional channel of communication with nature.
Unlike a “conventional” ruin, defined by a process of organic deterioration, with “Simbiosi” a reconstruction takes place, following unusual rules of matter, in which the artist’s design inserts itself in the ruin’s structure. Indeed, here the absent matter embodies the mental shape that tries to define and retain the weight of matter by giving it a rational form.
“Simbiosi” is an interpretation of the surrounding landscape through the intentional connections between architectural and natural elements, whose continuous exchange defines the aesthetics, meanings, and logics of sculpture. The architectural archetypes, through which Tresoldi narrates the landscape’s elements, become the channel through which they can be interpreted.
If Man’s attraction to ruins, in the words of François René de Chateaubriand, arises from “une conformité secrète” between destroyed monuments and the transience of our existence, here it is interpreted not as the expression of the idea of a winning humanity, like in the case of monumental architecture, but of human fragility.
“Simbiosi” responds to the urge to analyze something you want to know. The artwork oscillates between earthly and spiritual dimensions; it embodies the primordial human desire to merge with the natural elements and, at the same time, to interpret them; the need to become part of the landscape and to represent it according to our own codes.
Sculpted by the surrounding landscape, “Simbiosi” lives and breathes in deep connection with Arte Sella park, which itself has been subject to the transformative action of nature: the same hill where the installation is located would not have existed had the 2018 storm not taken place. Nature, growing slowly, will define a new, additional architecture. Like the other artworks, “Simbiosi” will become part of the Arte Sella fabric and will ultimately merge with the park.
