A 350-square-meter stylized Tuscany: it's Andreco's new work in Florence

It is called Arno - Imaginary Topography the new work by Andreco (Andrea Conte; Rome, 1978), an environmental engineer, but above all one of the most appreciated Italian artists of recent times: it is a site-specific intervention made at the Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence, placed immediately under the chimney of the central courtyard. It is an imaginary topography, a sort of stylized map of Tuscany that, starting from the shapes of the great river that bathes it, theArno, brings the territory inside the Manifattura, according to Andreco’s poetics that is strongly focused on the relationship between man and the landscape and on themes closely related to the actuality of this relationship, starting with climate change.

“Under the iconic smokestack of Manifattura Tabacchi,” explains curator Caterina Taurelli Salimbeni, who curated the intervention, "the imaginary topography of another place extends. Wide fields of different shades of red, interrupted by the presence of blue boulders, form earthen plateaus and moats that embrace and watch over the sinuous line of a river. The result of an analysis of data on the Arno River on the alternation of floods and low flows over the last century, the floor drawing symbolically recalls rivers and the alterations they have undergone due to climate change in the Mediterranean area. Aiming to overturn the hierarchy that places humans in first place, followed by animals, plants, and finally mineral and inorganic matter, the work plays with animate and inanimate life by questioning epistemological and constructed distinctions between hot bricks and vegetation that has grown free in a once-abandoned square. As is always the case in the artist’s practice, the work stems from a study of place and intends to bring to the surface a complexity of relationships underlying it."

“What used to be a concrete pour,” Taurelli Salimbeni continues, “before that was an earthy chasm, a sort of metaphor for human intervention in the geography of the planet. In contrast to the verticality, orthogonality and static nature of architecture, Andreco makes work on the surface, along curvilinear trajectories in constant movement, adding new meanings to space, between an industrial past and a present of regeneration. An operation as simple as it is revolutionary because, in uncovering the earth, springs and stones and exposing them to the sky, it reconstitutes the natural ecosystem as a living and collective organism, breaking through human and individual patterns. The artist’s research projects this truth into a future landscape that is nevertheless already here. A tribute to geology and the land, but above all an invitation once again to reconsider the anthropocentric view of the world in order to relocate nature to its primordial place.”

Theartist himself also explains his intervention: “The concrete form in the courtyard,” he says, “suggests to me an imaginary topography, a geological and morphological study for a future landscape. The floor-drawing is meant to be a tribute to the territory, geology, rivers, wetlands, ecosystems, and the unevenness of the Tuscan territories and the place where it is located. A gradient of reds with a blue line in the center that symbolically depicts the Arno River in the province of Florence. An imaginative landscape determined by balanced blue elements. The shades of red present, take their cue from the color of the bricks of the Manifattura Tabacchi. The painting deconstructs the architectural elements present, fluidizes the industrial architectures, giving them a new life and a new beginning. The regenerated space takes on new functions and meanings, and it is the space that determines the image and the signifier.”

“I preferred to work in assonance and empathy with the places,” Andreco adds, “rather than displaying contrasting egotic decorations. The gradients of red also remind me of the areas in the graphs that indicate the aridity index of the soils, the lack of water and organic matter in the soils. Scientific studies show the alterations undergone by rivers due to climate change in the Mediterranean area. The acceleration of desertification processes such as the increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events change their fate. The alternation of flooding and leaning will become more and more radical. Rivers and boulders are subjects very dear to me, everywhere I try to pay homage to them in order to overturn the famous anthropocentric hierarchy that sees man in first place, then animals, then plants and finally mineral and inorganic matter. This view has caused a rapid loss of biodiversity and a major alteration of ecosystems, leading us to the current environmental, climate and health crisis. My works aim to shift this hierarchy, putting geologies, inanimate rocks, first. Plants, animals and humans should coexist in a mutualistic and symbiotic form. The ambition of my works is to change the human point of view from anthropocentric to ecocentric.”

Pictured is the work Arno - Imaginary Topography by Andreco. Ph. Credit Giovanni Andrea Rocchi

A 350-square-meter stylized Tuscany: it's Andreco's new work in Florence

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