Piazza Salomé

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Piazza Salomé

John Baldessari
Green Kiss/ Red Embrace (DISJUNCTIVE), 1988.
Four black and white photographs with oil tint. 396.24 × 487.68 cm.
Courtesy of the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

Contest (Awarded a Special Mention under 35)
Di-Segnare il giardino by Asilo Bianco | Italy
Teamwork with Anna Proskuriakova
Orta San Giulio, Italy, 2021

{LOVE}

“Love is a state in which a man sees things
most decidedly as they are not.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

What happened in May 1882 in Orta San Giulio?
It is said that Friedrich Nietzsche fell in love there with the charming Russian girl Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Do we know the details? Not.
But when we fall in love, we see the world completely different, not like others around.

The world becomes contrasting, we sink to the bottom or rise to heaven, there is no longer anything in between, just positive and negative.

Where is your focus? On the subject of your adoration or on the world around you? Can you see everything at once or are you only concentrating on one thing?
How do you see the city? Do you feel the fragrant smell of flowers more strongly and do the screams of children on the street become louder?
Maybe blow off the lake calms you?
The world plays with you as well as your mind, you fall in love more and more.

View from South to North

{PATH}

The city becomes a decoration for your own history, your personal experience. Here you felt the breath from the lake for the first time before going downstairs and realizing that you fell in love. And here you are again at the same point where everything is the same, but you are already different. You are going to Sacro Monte, perhaps you need a stop, you need to rest and think. Look around before your final step.

{POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPACES}

The design project intertwines the idea of the path as a place for experience and the concept of “positive” and “negative” spaces in art.

By treating the background as what sometimes can be the most important part of the storytelling, where the pause between words can say more than the phrase itself, and the space between houses can often tell even much more than buildings around, the design focuses on the typology of “negative” and “positive” spaces of Orta San Giulio.

The beholder always chooses what to focus on.

The design elements, be it an amphitheater or a playground for children, referencing to existing city spaces, are not explicit, they seem to hint and predict the upcoming experience. They seem to frame the view of the lake, direct the eye and guide the walker. Where is your focus? On the subject of your adoration or on the world around you? Can you see everything at once or are you only concentrating on one thing?