The Invisible Mountain is part of the 17th Venice Architecture BIennale
Sometimes objects embody a conflict, a contradiction, an impossibility. This is what happens with these fabrics. By enveloping the mountain, they allow its existence and deny it; they preserve it and erase it. Made of stable long-chain polymers, the microplastics dispersed by these fabrics will persist in the environment even when the Presena glacier has fatally disappeared.
At once temporary and
It is a tragic reminder of how our actions are affecting the planet on a geological scale, how our very idea of 'nature' needs to be reformulated. In the age of the Anthropocene there is no more wilderness, the world has become a planetary garden that we influence and maintain - consciously or unconsciously. When a mountain has to be wrapped in plastic to save millennia-old ecosystems that may n
A portion of these fabrics (5x15m), draped in the shape of the mountain ridge it preserves flies suspended by invisible threads in the Italian Pavilion at the 17th Architecture Biennale.
The Biennale 2021, curated by Hashim Sarkis, poses the question "How will we live together?". Many pavilions and authors have completed the question: "How will we live together with our planet?". This question is
At the same time, the fabric recovered after spending two seasons protecting the glacier can be read like a shroud. The image of this being so profoundly different from us - the Presena Glacier - becomes manifest. The traces of melting snow are, in this context, comparable to the Imago Christi of the Shroud of Turin. A shroud that bears the trace and memory of the disappearance from this world o
