Procuratie Vecchie, a prestigious building located in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, reopened on 8 April 2022 for the first time in 500 years thanks to a significant five-year restoration by David Chipperfield Architects Milan and promoted by Generali.
The renovated spaces will house the headquarters of The Human Safety Net foundation, an NGO that supports vulnerable individuals and families by enabling them to build a safe future for themselves.
And it is precisely in this context that Edoardo Tresoldi inaugurated his new work Monumento, designed and built in the central space of the Procuratie Vecchie’s internal staircase. The work, designed in collaboration with Carlotta Franco for the development of the concept and with the design support of GICO Studio, represents a majestic 15.50 metre high classical style column that soars along the floors of the building, connecting them. Given its size and location, it is impossible to see it in its entirety: to admire it, one is forced to change perspective, raise one’s gaze and climb up one step at a time in order to view it bit by bit.
In its majesty, Monument acquires lightness through the use of wire mesh, Tresoldi’s material of choice. The ‘absent material’ capable of giving life to visionary works in evocative contexts such as the Basilica of Siponto in Puglia, Opera on the seafront in Reggio Calabria, and Gharfa in Saudi Arabia. And thanks to its impressiveness, Monumento makes us reflect on the fragility and vulnerability of contemporary society using a powerful and expressive artistic language, as indicated by Tresoldi’s words:
“Monumental architecture is a song that neglects function to ritualise a thought through a plastic act. The history of populations is a hereditary flow of rhetorical figures that cyclically recur; they redefine their own meanings and establish symbolisms that we have not only learnt to read but that, generation after generation, we have absorbed as a sort of latent language of the collective unconscious. Thus, if we strip a monument of its symbolism, what remains is a virtuous and melancholic lyrical song, detached and solemn, yet in search of contact because it is born to express itself, to be first artefact and gesture and then concept and presence. With Monumento, I use the rhetorical language of the monumental column as a reflection on our time and on the rhetoric of values to which our society aspires; a society that reaffirms the need to redefine the concept of strength, to reinterpret the role of fragility and that proposes listening and dialogue at the centre of intercultural relations”.
Once again we are very proud that Edoardo Tresoldi has chosen Cavatorta wire mesh to create a new visionary and evocative masterpiece, in connection with a unique and prestigious place like the Procuratie Vecchie.
Photo © Roberto Conte