Agora and the Absent matter
Artist Edoardo Tresoldi’s ‘Opera’, with its wire mesh outlines, blends the code of society, culture and time to create art – producing an ephemeral experience through metaphysical ruins.
Team AI
Edoardo Tresoldi adorned the Italian landscape with another marvellous installation, marking this to be the second major permanent public artwork in Italy. Titled Opera, the installation creates a landscape for visitors to contemplate about the realities that surround us and brings to light a relationship between the visible and the invisible, space and time, and, the individual and the larger collective.
Encompassing a park of 2500 square metres on Reggio Calabria’s seafront, the installation has 48 pillars constructed in a manner that reflect the archetypes of classical architecture. Using open wire mesh, it creates an agora through the transparency of Absent Matter. The poetics that surround the large pillars, peaking at 8 meters, is owed to the natural landscape of varying heights of the park itself. Tresoldi was conscious of the natural path that the park offers and wished to break away from it – establishing two melodies that are working together to create a harmony at a site that was chosen by the artist meticulously.
Absent Matter, a representation of a mental projection, ignites a new dialogue between the landscape and the historical narrative that surrounds it. Tresoldi’s work makes one wonder what that place would look like had the monument or the reality of that projection existed in real time. It suspends the present and past through the physicality of the installation, without disturbing the heritage or the architecture of that place; creating a dialogue between what has never existed and what is existing now. What is transparent cannot be seen. And yet through the abstraction of matter, Opera, with its wire mesh outlines, spaces and blends the code of society, culture and time to create art – producing an ephemeral experience through metaphysical ruins.
The pillars blend the domains of the land, the sky and the sea together, while framing Sicily in the background in a whole new way. They create a corridor that reforms the relationship between space and human; plays with shadow and light; and creates an organic balance between the obvious openness and the perceived enclosure formed in our minds. Such an exercise restates the questions surrounding heritage, cultures and the concepts of preservation within a completely different frame.
The wonder that is experienced through the metaphysics of the myth and structures, gets absorbed into the installation’s play of construction and deconstruction, heights and depths, what is and what is not. Open to visitors and tourists alike, Opera, commissioned by the local Municipality, is set to become a key landmark in Italy’s scenery and one of the largest European public spaces.
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All Images and the video are Courtesy of the Artist.
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