17. Molino Nuovo
Before the Maloja, before the Bregaglia, Souvenir di montagna meets the city.
Before the Maloja, before the Bregaglia, Souvenir di montagna meets the city.
Not in the historic centre, not in a monumental space, but in a playground.
The project’s first permanent installation was placed in 2023 in the green area of the new nursery school in Molino Nuovo, Lugano.
The work consists of a constructed erratic in Cor-Ten steel, two metres sixty per side, and a series of boulders from various building sites in Ticino, rearranged as a small artificial landscape.
The choice of place seems unexpected at first. Less so if one applies the criterion of the previous chapter. An erratic needs a place capable of absorbing a certain amount of foreignness without expelling it and without normalising it. A playground is one of the few public places where an object that does not explain itself is not a problem. No one asks what it is for. One goes inside. Children discover by using it what this journey takes sixteen chapters to say.
Then there is the other half of the work, the half that was not built. The boulders surrounding the steel element are trovanti: rocks brought to light during excavations carried out in different years in Ticino. Someone extracted them, someone loaded them, someone set them down here. They arrived in Lugano on a lorry. It is exactly the Staffelbach operation, without a law requiring it and without monumental intent. The glacier replaced by an excavator bucket and a flatbed, a second time.
With one difference that matters. In Staffelbach the boulder had to stay near the place where it was found, because only there does it demonstrate the force of the glacier: moving it away would have reduced it to an ornament.
These trovanti, by contrast, come from different places and have been brought together.
They have lost their value as evidence and gained something else.
They no longer bear witness to a glacier: they build an environment.
In that environment a comparison becomes possible that is found nowhere else.
A found boulder and a designed boulder, resting on the same plane, at the same scale, under the same light. They have the same grammar, broad planes, sharp edges, no right angles, and were born of two histories that have nothing in common.
Whoever looks needs no explanation. It is enough to walk around both. And only one of the two can be opened.
The Cor-Ten element has no mass: it lacks one face, and that is where one enters.
From inside one looks out through slits that repeat the defensive apparatus of Ticino, the observation posts dug into the rock, the camouflaged firing positions. The combative nature of the imagery remains, exorcised by the fact that children play inside.
An erratic is something that comes down. This one has arrived in the city, two hundred and seventy metres above sea level, at the bottom of the valley. The next one goes back up.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Natural and artificial compared
Setting the trovanti next to the Cor-Ten steel element
Souvenir di montagna, 2023
Molino Nuovo, Lugano
Molino Nuovo, Lugano
Installation at Molino Nuovo: the Cor-Ten element and the trovanti
Souvenir di montagna, Molino Nuovo, design drawings of the ensemble