Venice, in the newly opened Procuratie Vecchie also features an installation by Edoardo Tresoldi

As we reported yesterday on these pages, after a five-year restoration by David Chipperfield Architects Milan, sponsored by Generali, the Procuratie Vecchie in St. Mark’s Square in Venice are once again opening to the city. In the building, which opens to the public for the first time in five hundred years, it will also be possible to see a new installation by Edoardo Tresoldi (Milan, 1987), entitled Monumento.

The Procuratie Vecchie reveal their spaces, called to fulfill a new social purpose, 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 so that they can transform the lives of their families and communities. Thus, starting from this important new course that the space is about to inaugurate, Tresoldi’s installation, created in collaboration with Carlotta Franco for the development of the architectural concept and with the design support of GICO Studio, aspires to rework the language of the monumental column and the values to which society aspires in order to reflect on its own time.

The column is positioned in the space around which the staircase of the Procuratie Vecchie 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 is able to see the column in its entirety, from base to end, in a change of perspective that in turn triggers a conceptual reversal.

“Monumental architecture is a song that leaves out function to ritualize a thought through a plastic act,” declares Edoardo Tresoldi. “The history of peoples is an inherited stream of rhetorical figures that cyclically recur; they redefine their own 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, stripping a monument of its symbolism, what remains is a virtuous and melancholy lyrical song, detached and solemn, yet seeking contact because it is born to express itself, to be first artifact and gesture and then concept and presence. With Monument I use the rhetorical language of the monumental column as a reflection on our time and the rhetoric of 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.”

Venice, in the newly opened Procuratie Vecchie also features an installation by Edoardo Tresoldi

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