With Physis by Arcangelo Sassolino, Arte Sella opens up to technology

Arte Sella - the Contemporary Mountain had announced that its collection would be enriched by a new work by Vicenza-based artist Arcangelo Sassolino (Vicenza, 1967), and indeed, on Saturday, June 18, Physis, aninstallation in which technology, art and nature coexist and through which Arte Sella, the artistic path in the nature of the Val di Sella in Trentino, officially opens, after thirty-six years of uninterrupted investigation, to dialogue with technology, was presented.

Physis consists of an electronic part and a motor that is activated and takes action by a solar panel. The work consists of a mass of granite from Pedretti Graniti’s quarry in Carisolo (TN), cut in two and placed on a track. Each day, activated bysolar energy, it repeats a very slow but relentless cycle of opening and closing: in the morning the two halves move away from each other; in the middle of the day they are at the maximum of their distance (a meter and a half); in the afternoon, they slowly close again. Never equal to itself, the movement is a function of the amount of energy available, captured by the solar panels. Through technology, the work breathes with the world. Surrounded by nature, Sassolino’s work stands in a secluded area of the Malga Costa exhibition route where mountains rise in the background. When the two boulders move, they reveal the initially hidden landscape in the middle, thus offering a new perspective on nature.

Like gems, flowers, shells, and trees, Physis has the frustrating slowness of always appearing still. Its slow being is totally disengaged from the human power grid, depending only on the energy of the sun. Bound to weather events, it builds up some strength with clear skies, but if it rains or snows for days, it stops. And like humans and animals, it sleeps at night. “It is a work about the weight of time, about the slow and inexorable transformation of nature that has nothing of the hysterical cynicism of our society. He is a horizontal Sisyphus, his ascent is the weather,” the artist explained.

By making nature and technique functional to each other, Sassolino’s installation seems to address that opposition between nature and technique that has characterized Western thought since antiquity. The precision of mechanics, that is, of the technical capacity of the human being, is intertwined with the imprecision and unpredictability of extracted matter and weathering. Physis is the unfolding, the movement that manifests the being of things that are, like a kind of breathing of matter. And like all unfolding, the movement of the work is the fatigue of separation, the opening of a wound that is at once the very condition of the joy of being.

Image: Arcangelo Sassolino, Physis (2022, Arte Sella). Photo by Giacomo Bianchi

With Physis by Arcangelo Sassolino, Arte Sella opens up to technology

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.