Montgomery's light installation on the future kicks off BASE Milan

As of today, the unprecedented site-specific installation by Scottish artist and poet Robert Montgomery, created in collaboration with NEXI, has been placed on the front door of the BASE Milan headquarters. The work kicks off BASE’s new multi-year art programming, In-Between.

It consists of the luminous inscription The future is an invisible playground, a poem about the future and challenge, intended to represent at the same time the connection between an inside and an outside, between a city and an ecosystem.

Robert Montgomery has been collaborating with public space for years, mixing form, light and languages, scattering light words, fire poems and posters. He follows a tradition of conceptual art and distinguishes himself by bringing a poetic voice to text art; his work engages and activates urban places, giving the city insights into the contemporary.

“With the Covid emergence, we are at a time when our present seems very difficult, and also in a way strangely frozen,” Montgomery said. "That’s why I wanted to create a work for BASE that speaks of the future and represents the world coming back to life. We don’t know what the future holds, but it will be ours, and it can be good if we work together to make it so. This is a light poem dedicated to winter and the solstice to mark the transition from 2020 to 2021. With this transition from darkness to light, I hope we can rise up after all the challenges of 2020, and seize in 2021 the chance to change the world for the better, to put ecology and equality first, and to build a new world, founded on kindness."

The Scottish artist’s site-specific installation inaugurates BASE’s new art programming, which will see collaboration at various times throughout the year with national and international artists, who will be invited to work on the concept of porosity.

“BASE and its uses break out of their boundaries and occupy public space,” commented Linda Di Pietro, curator and program director of BASE Milan. “We propose a shift in meaning and focus from space to frame, from home to threshold, which explodes a question about art as an exceptionality that admits what would not otherwise be permissible, and always produces, by backlash, something in the public dimension. The threshold of BASE becomes porous. A porosity that is inhabited; a porosity that does not have the subtle clarity of a demarcating boundary, but is an expanded space that creates a zone BETWEEN that can neutralize the division between what is inside and what is outside, and intercepts a question often asked in recent years about the role of art in society: art outside its own space and in its relationship to the real.”

Montgomery's light installation on the future kicks off BASE Milan

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