In the court of FuturDome, Gianni Pettena presents the installation Archipensiero, through a talk that examines the first fifty years of public art of an architect, of a craftsman who has changed the state of critical perception of space, through interventions caused by the relationship with the landscape.
On April 14th during the 2018 art week night, Archipensieri is presented as an ideal introduction to the exhibition activities hosted in the interior spaces of FuturDome. The installation modifies the spatial perspective of the entrance courtyard, through four large-sized corner elements, whose location is perceived differently depending on the height and position of the viewer, to form the perfect image of a cube , as the observer proceeds towards the inside. Also in this case, Gianni Pettena (1940, Bolzano) establishes, within the history and anatomy of FuturDome, a lesson on the multiple possibilities of approach to space and on the need to ask ourselves about our certainties about the existence of a space preordained.
Archipensieri, installed and narrated, through a presentation talk, in FuturDome proposes not only a different reading, but also a lesson in spatial perception. Metaphorically reaffirms the conviction of how now there are no boundaries, in dealing with issues related to physical space, between the sensitivity of the architect and that of today’s environmental artist. Architecture, represented here by an icon that synthetically symbolizes its entire history, becomes recognizable only through a more careful reading of space, only through a path that leads from a disenchanted perception to a more conscious one, able to consider and evaluate the changes, the reference data and the relationships that, apparently always changing, are recomposed through the control of reason, so that the apparent disorder finds (but can also not find) an order, a structure, a memory. With the “physicality” and the large dimensions of the work, conceived in occasion of a conference on the theme of the future of contemporary art in an urban context (“Inonia. Which cities of art to come” ?, Cassino University, 25-26 May 2001), the author also intended to express his own opinion on the topic of the debate in a useful way to reaffirm, through the visual impact, every possible theoretical affirmation.
The work was carried out, in a special area of a collection (Longo Collection, Cassino) particularly attentive to the themes of environmental art and the correct perception of physical space. The seventy-year-old artist, after a historical frequentation of the world of art and architecture, (object of a long and progressive phenomenology of quotations and inspirations by critics, architects and contemporary artists), with the presence of Archipensieri reiterates the crystallization of a role generally attributed to masters more or less disappeared from the scene, claiming instead the continuity of their work still in progress.