Besana ’87, 1987
Wood and foam rubber, 20x52x52 cm
Mauro Staccioli Archive Museum, Volterra
In the spring of 1987, Flavio Caroli organized Mauro Staccioli’s solo exhibition at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan. The sculptor’s reading of a richly characterized eighteenth-century setting is astonishing in its size, its dynamic momentum and its ability to integrate the plastic sign into the architectural context: an inverted arch that explores with one edge the height of the dome in its center while the other, opposed to the multiple arches, lies along one of the Greek cross-shaped arms. The plastic form is suggested to him, in fact, by the superabundant element of the arches to transform itself, in the intervention, into an unstable and light sign. Numerous prismoids, then, are scattered along the environment’s intersecting lines to recall, with their pointed appearance, the past destination of the place as a site of isolation and quarantine.
The sculpture is now located at Tenuta Mara, San Clemente (RN), in a very different context from the original but no less evocative.
©Ela Bialkowska Okno Studio. Courtesy Archivio Mauro Staccioli.
L’Archivio Mauro Staccioli ha collaborato con la Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute di Roma per la digitalizzazione dell’intero corpus documentario afferente ai lavori realizzati o ipotizzati dall’artista, dall’inizio della carriera fino al 1988. Si ringrazia il fotografo Enrico Fontolan, il Digital Humanities Lab e il Fondo Fotografico della Bibliotheca Hertziana per l’enorme lavoro svolto. Tutto il materiale è consultabile online cliccando qui.