07.2023

SKIN_ROMAN WALLS
a site specific for the city of Como, Italy

silicon rubber, nails 

250 x 150 cm

Como, the city where I have lived for about 15 years, is founded on Roman walls built by Gaius Julius Caesar in 59 BC. Parts of the ancient walls that defined the city of Novum Comum still exist today, often not visible to the public, inside private gardens and homes. Part of them are the foundations of a building founded in 1773 and still home the Alessandro Volta classical High School.

The president of the Accademia Pliniana in 2023, the year in which the city of Como celebrates the two 

thousandth anniversary of the birth of its most illustrious Roman citizen Pliny the Elder, invited me to create a work that reflects on the origins of the city while opening a dialogue between the present it is gone. My idea was to focus attention on the subject of the walls kept inside the courtyard of the Volta High School. By creating a skin of silicone rubber, I sealed the texture of those ancient walls forever. Not only. The work recounts the passage of time thanks to the dirt that has clung to the rubber. 

The transferred traces bring with them the signs, like scars and the shades of color, like the stains of an old lady, tired but proud. The solidity of these precious walls that have spanned the centuries still stand there today, waiting for them to be made worthy of our contemporary gaze.