Elisabetta Benassi La città sale

dimensione ambiente

Elisabetta Benassi draws from cultural and political tradition, from art and human sciences, to analyze the present and restore it with the most controversial aspects. Rediscovering history and the collective memory via the use of materials, objects, mechanical devices, and mixed media, the artist builds up narratives that lead to a reflection on the role of the past in the present, fostering a new relationship with the contemporary. This is also the case for La città sale. Inspired by Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910), Benassi’s work, on the one hand, refers to that same revolutionary and constructive dimension, aimed at the creation of the present, and, on the other, to the inexorable coming to terms with the catastrophic events that are dominated by precariousness and instability, an example of this being the earthquake that occurred in L’Aquila in 2009. Indeed, it is salt – with it layers slowly sedimented over the course of time – that presents the forms of a city that in order to preserve and conserve itself, must now be condensed into a thick deposit of memory, to then offer itself once more to the present, supported by the continuous effort of the mechanical elevators, a reference to the urban landscape of the reconstruction.

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Foto Agostino Osio - Alto Piano

MAXXI L’AQUILA commission

Installation