Visita guidata, 1994

Guided Tour, 1994 — stainless steel and aluminium, 25 × 54 × 400 cm. First installed at the Galleria La Nuova Pesa, Rome, as part of a three-artist group exhibition, alongside Maurizio Arcangeli and Guglielmo Aschieri, entitled Saldatura.

Visita guidata stems from a very specific architectural and institutional context, which Cavenago immediately transforms into a conceptual device. The space at 530 Via del Corso, at the time the headquarters of La Nuova Pesa, had been shared for almost a decade, from 1985 to 1993, with the Mara Coccia Association: two historic galleries on the Roman art scene, both active since the 1960s and 1970s, which had occupied the same address for years. In 1993, Mara Coccia was forced to leave that space, remaining without a permanent home for a time; La Nuova Pesa took over the vacated premises, expanding its space and creating an opening in the partition wall to merge the two rooms into a single, continuous exhibition space. It was in this newly enlarged gallery, in 1994 – the very year in which the merger of the two spaces was completed – that Cavenago was invited to exhibit.

His approach was the opposite of that taken by the architects who had joined the two spaces: he almost completely closes off the newly created opening, leaving only a small hole, and through that hole he threads a long tubular steel bar, four metres long, which connects two cubic pedestals, one in each of the two spaces — the very same spaces which, until a few months earlier, had belonged to two distinct galleries, each with different histories, programmes and audiences, and which the artist now reconnects not through the newly created architectural opening, but through a sculptural mechanism that, in a critical manner, restores their separation.

The two cubes, fitted with concealed wheels at the base and covered on their upper surfaces with a non-slip aluminium material, are in every respect plinths, the most conventional and stereotypical element of museum display, the one on which, by custom, a work of art is placed so that the public can view it from below looking upwards. Cavenago overturns this hierarchy: he explicitly invites the public to climb onto the plinths, thereby offering the opportunity to view the group exhibition, Saldatura – a title that, not coincidentally, alludes to a fusion, just like the one that has just taken place between the two galleries – not from the viewer’s perspective, but from the literally elevated vantage point that normally belongs to the artwork itself.

The structural constraint is what makes the installation a genuine relational mechanism. The two pedestals, connected by the rigid bar passing through the hole in the wall, are not free to move in any direction: their range of movement is limited by the length of the bar and the width of the hole itself, which acts as a sort of mechanical hinge between the two spaces. When a person steps onto one of the two cubes, their weight and movement are transmitted through the bar to the twin plinth, which moves accordingly in the other space, but appears to do so of its own accord, without a visible operator, because the almost entirely enclosed wall prevents anyone in one of the two rooms from seeing what is happening in the other.

The result is a twofold and deliberately disorienting effect: those who climb onto the pedestal to ‘view the exhibition from above’ cannot see the effect their action produces on the other side of the wall; whereas those in the opposite room witness the autonomous, seemingly unmotivated movement of an empty pedestal, without being able to trace the cause back to a simple human being on the other side who has hoisted themselves onto the twin cube. It is a mechanism that appears kinetic, almost automatic, but which is in reality entirely human, driven not by a motor but by the visitor’s own body.

The title, Visita guidata, thus takes on a sharp double meaning, reinforced precisely by the history of the venue hosting it: in this installation, there is no human guide to accompany the public through the exhibition; the guide is the mechanism itself – the opening that connects the two once-separate spaces and the bar that defines, in a wholly structural and impersonal manner, the scope of movement permitted. A silent, mechanical guide which, through the interplay of the two once-distinct rooms, re-enacts the very architectural memory of the place that made it possible. It is a compositional principle that Cavenago would revisit, years later, in a different but conceptually similar form, with Nastro Trasportatore at the Galleria Raffaella Cortese in Milan, another work designed to span two adjacent spaces, confirming how the theme of the exhibition space—divided and reconnected by a concealed mechanical element—constitutes one of the most original and recurring strands of his practice.