After a five-year restoration by David Chipperfield Architects Milan and supported by Generali, the reopening of the Procuratie Vecchie in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square is inaugurated with Edoardo Tresoldi’s site-specific installation, “Monumento.” The installation, conceived in collaboration with Carlotta Franco in preparation for the location’s new use for the first time in 500 years as headquarters of The Human Safety Net foundation, renews and subverts the language of the monumental column and the traditional values to which society aspires. “Monumento” comprises a column set within the space that contains the staircase of the Procuratie Vecchie, in proportional dialogue with the monument it mimics. By climbing the stairs, the viewer is both able to see the column in its entirety and to change her perspective of this monument, dematerializing colossal myths and condensing past and present into an ongoing narrative.
As Tresoldi states, “Monumental architecture is a composition which neglects function in order to ritualize a thought by means of a three-dimensional work… When, therefore, a monument is stripped of its own symbolism, what remains is a virtuoso and melancholic lyric song, discrete and solemn, and yet in search of contact because it was born to be expressed, first as artifact and gesture and then as a concept and presence.” This presence places listening and dialogue at the center of intercultural and intergenerational relations.
