TECHNOLOGICAL HYBRIDISATION
by Mimmo Di Marzio

The installation created by Loris Cecchini for the Fortress of Exilles sets up a strongly disorienting yet simultaneously poetic dialogue with the surrounding space. Located in the outer courtyard of the Fortress, firmly anchored to an oblong portion of lawn at the entrance to the Fortress between the walls of the pathway leading to the main courtyard, the artist's luminous cocoon/shaped sculpture is a surreally organic structure in which both the techno/urban and the natural compensation chamber between reality and fantasy, between physical room and mental space.
Cecchini's use of street furniture / objects deeply rooted in the collective memory /increases the spectator's sense of disorientation. Totally de/contextualised within the confines of the Fortress, the streetlamps are stripped of any functional value/ illumination, decoration / in order to enable them to incarnate a new, free raison d'être in which technological elements act according to the most different ways and means. The organic form deriving from this process of artificial hybridisation becomes a sort of metaphysical prosthesis which transfigures the original element and enables it to acquire its own life.
Cecchini's "Five Rings" installation is part of a long term project which has seen the artist use many different materials and means, often based on familiar spaces (a motor car, a caravan, a tree house), to create architectural/sculptural works which transform them into paradoxical situations. Recently Cecchini has also developed this poetic in public art projects such as "Blaublobbing", an installation crated for Palazzo Bricherasio in Turin in which two transparent, molecular/type covers come out of the windows of the façade like extraneous organic elements of the building, "a sort of artificial virus with respect to the architectural body of the building"

LORIS CECCHINI
INTERVIEW BY LUIGI FASSI

LUIGI FASSI Tell me about your new sculpture.

LORIS CECCHINI My new sculpture sees a structure anchored to a working, metal and inflatable plastic street lamp, a real and proper micro architecture which gives the idea of a sort of private organic cell, a cellular cocoon, with only a thin membrane separating the inside from the out. The form is artificial, yet makes a clear visual reference to images of biological and animal life.
It is also pervaded by the idea of a private interior. The lightweight chair positioned inside the structure gives the whole complex a human reference, while the public source of light is used in a private context like an unusual form of interior lighting.
Thus the work is a sort of poetic suspension within the Fortress of Exilles, a place of isolation and defence, shelter and escape, a location secluded in the silence of the mountains. The form proposes these issues on a private, individual scale and thus the installation can be seen as a dreamlike micro-architecture, linked to the dimension of distance, an ideal unit in which nature and artifice unite.

Your work has always been very 'contemporary', pervaded by a desire to investigate the tension between the artificial and the natural in everyday life. The Fortress of Exilles brings your art, perhaps for the first time, in contact with the weight of history and the past. What ideas has this confrontation generated: How do you see the relationship between con temporary art and history?

In 2002 I was involved in a similar experience in collaboration with the Teseco Foundation in Pisa and the Superintendence of Archeology for Tuscany. The installation I created, "Terraforming", was a large structure covered in a prismatic film which took the form of a series of superimposed slabs inside which I placed original vases and amphoras from Pisa Archeological Museum.
The work focused on simultaneously revealing and hiding the ancient objects, trying to negate their perception by unveiling them as a mirage or apparition and thus visualising the metaphor of the presence absence of history and our relationship with it. My aim was to provide a transfigured vision of the ancient objects, different from our usual perception of their historic weight.
Opportunities to interact with forms from the past offer strong stimuli both to me and to the public and, indeed, encourage us to rethink our perception of the past and the present and to accept them as a continuum of interactions and contrasts. Italy is a privileged point of departure for such a reflection as it is exceedingly rich in elements for comparison.
Conservation of the past is important, yet it is also necessary to persuade the public to truly enter the present, to feel part of the folds of history as it is projected towards the future. Architecture and more generally the re qualification of space are fundamental elements of this approach.
As far as the relationship between contemporary artists and history is concerned, I believe it is inevitable. All languages have origins and precedents. Only through reflection and comparison can artists generate different results and accept ances.

Your more recent architectural works seem to focus on synthesising, almost rarefying or distilling highly symbolic forms. Is there some sort of idealism in this? Do you believe consideration of the ideal to be as effective a means of reflecting on reality as the many forms of artistic activism which are so dominant today?

I set great store by the imagination. My means of interpreting and transfiguring forms enables me to bring together different levels of reality in such a way as to find a common denominator between the real and the artificial. I am convinced that man's perceptive organisation moves on a double track and my work always strives to find a form of mediation between the physical and the abstract, the poetic and the functional. I believe that real life and linguistic artifice meet at an ideal level which is manifest in a suspended, ambiguous image, subject by its very nature to different interpretations.
This is where the ambiguous nature of art comes into play, transfigures the elements and leads them beyond the merely
informative' dimension. My latest, more architec tural, works have led me to think of forms which are practical places yet are manifest as dreamlike elements suspended in a private, emotional sphere.

The idea of architecture is increasingly present in your work and you recently con firmed that your latest works were better understood by the world of architecture than by the world of art. What has caused this shift from one environment to another?
How do you relate your artistic work to the functionality of architecture?

Over the last few years, the relationship between art and architecture has once again become closer with the two disciplines being sufficiently conceptually and formally hybridised as to enable effective exchanges of role between artists and architects. In many cases the cultural use of space is the common denominator. Of course, artists' solutions general ly tend to focus on different plans and poetics.
Rather than being conditioned by utilitarian ver quirements and practical matters, they tend to exploit art's ability to reflect on more spiritual moments. I personally tend to exploit the transfigurative abilities of art. My passion for planning and my interest in environments which are not characterised only by the presence of images and objects have led me to a confrontation with space or rather 'space as an object' which focuses on sculptural forms and evanescence: a simultaneous consideration of practical places and mirage like tricks of the eye. The concepts of organic nature and geometry, the interior as a physical and psychological space, technology and its repercussions on the emotions and the possibility of manipulating material into other extraneous forms enable me to work on a quantity of different elements which lie halfway between construction and deconstruction, halfway between personal affections and public projections. My aim is to find the point at which the emotional element of a familiar subject meets its manifestation on a different visual and poetic plain, filtered by a mixed perception of memory and virtualisation.
Text translated by Sally Titcomb