Edoardo Tresoldi has presented the latest of his wire meshworks, inside the Procuratie Vecchie, which aims to give the visitor a new experience in which to witness Tresoldi's redefinition of monumental architecture, which we will be able to observe as we ascend the staircase from different perspectives.
After a five-year restoration by David Chipperfield Architects Milan, promoted by Generali, the iconic Procuratie Vecchie building in St. Mark's Square is reopening to the city, enriched by the installation of the Edoardo Tresoldi Monument.
For the first time in 500 years, this prestigious venue reveals its spaces, called to fulfil a new social purpose, as witnessed by the opening of the headquarters of The Human Safety Net foundation, the global movement of NGOs, volunteers, and partners working with people living in vulnerable conditions to transform the lives of their families and communities.
Based on this important new direction that the space is about to inaugurate, the installation created in collaboration with Carlotta Franco, for the development of the architectural concept and with the design support of GEICO Studio, reformulates the language of the monumental column and the values to which society aspires to reflect on its own time.
The column is located in the space around which the Procuratie Vecchie staircase develops.
Its proportions dialogue with those of the space and the visitor is invited to a close-up view that subverts the traditional rhetoric of the monument: by climbing the staircase, the viewer can see the column in its entirety, from the base to the end, in a change of perspective that in turn provokes a conceptual inversion.
After a five-year restoration by David Chipperfield Architects Milan, promoted by Generali, the iconic Procuratie Vecchie building in St. Mark's Square is reopening to the city, enriched by the installation of the Edoardo Tresoldi Monument.
For the first time in 500 years, this prestigious venue reveals its spaces, called to fulfil a new social purpose, as witnessed by the opening of the headquarters of The Human Safety Net foundation, the global movement of NGOs, volunteers, and partners working with people living in vulnerable conditions to transform the lives of their families and communities.
Based on this important new direction that the space is about to inaugurate, the installation created in collaboration with Carlotta Franco, for the development of the architectural concept and with the design support of GEICO Studio, reformulates the language of the monumental column and the values to which society aspires to reflect on its own time.
The column is located in the space around which the Procuratie Vecchie staircase develops.
Its proportions dialogue with those of the space and the visitor is invited to a close-up view that subverts the traditional rhetoric of the monument: by climbing the staircase, the viewer can see the column in its entirety, from the base to the end, in a change of perspective that in turn provokes a conceptual inversion.
"Monumental architecture is a song that sets aside function to ritualize a thought through a plastic act"
Edoardo Tresoldi
"The history of peoples is an inherited flow of rhetorical figures that repeat themselves cyclically; they redefine their meanings and establish symbolisms that we have not only learned to read but that, generation after generation, we have absorbed as a kind of latent language of the collective unconscious.
Thus, when a monument is stripped of its symbolism, what remains is a virtuosic and melancholic lyrical song, detached and solemn, but in search of contact because it is born to express itself, to be first an artefact and a gesture and then a concept and a presence.
With Monument I use the rhetorical language of the monumental column as a reflection on our times and on the rhetoric of the values to which our society aspires; a society that reaffirms the need to redefine the concept of strength, to reinterpret the role of fragility and that proposes listening and dialogue at the center of intercultural relations".
A society that recognizes its own fragility is naturally inclined to also recognize its sensitive parts, welcome diversity, and integrate the historical, existential, and metaphorical components that constitute it, in order to recompose them in a common horizon. In this process of changing the meaning of fragility, its role becomes vital and propulsive in the very definition of an ultimately plural and inclusive horizon.
By condensing past and present in a contemporary narrative, Tresoldi turns the rhetoric of the monument into an anti-rhetoric: "Monument" thus proposes imperfect completeness that dematerializes the colossal into the ethereal, accompanies the solemn sequence of every day, and builds harmony through the heterogeneous, expressing in the coexistence of different elements the reappropriation of an evolving world and the construction of a more conscious future.
