Edoardo Tresoldi has inaugurated a permanent installation on Reggio Calabria’s seafront, in Italy entitled Opera. Commissioned by the local Municipality and the Metropolitan City, the public art intervention “was created to celebrate the contemplative relationship between place and human beings through the language of classical architecture and the transparency of the Absent Matter”.
Consisting of a colonnade of 46 pillars peaking at 8 meters located in a 2,500-square meter park, Opera, the open wire-mesh structure is accessible to both locals and visitors. Fully crossable, the new landmark designed by Edoardo Tresoldi is set to become one of the largest European public spaces. Tresoldi’s second installation in Calabria after Il Collezionista di Venti in 2013, and the second major permanent public artwork in Italy after the Basilica of Siponto in Apulia, Opera “is a monument to contemplation through which the place further defines itself”.
Using pillars, the project creates a courtly frame, a sort of mental agora, leading the visitors, and generating a path of discovery, contrast, and harmony. In fact, “Tresoldi plays with the grammar of classical architecture – as well as with the transparency of the wire mesh – to research new visual poetics in dialogue with the surroundings and the viewer”.
The installation integrates relationships between visible and invisible, individual and community, delving into the stratification of ancestral horizons and daily practices, on the edge of a physical and mental terrain and suspended between art, architecture and landscape. -- Edoardo Tresoldi
Establishing different types of relationships with the surrounding, “the transparent pillars define an open structure that accommodates, accompanies and defines the spatial experience and establishes a direct relationship between earth and sky”. The physical outcome of Tresoldi’s reflections on architectural composition and decomposition, the installation encourages a dialogue between both overlapped entities, the park and the colonnades, between light and shadow, “evoking an organic connection between the transparency and the surrounding space”.
