15. Places
No erratic boulder chooses the place where it comes to rest. Its position is the result of a process.
The glacier carries it. The glacier retreats. The stone remains.
Its presence changes the landscape that receives it, but at the same time it is transformed by the new context. A boulder is not only what it is. It is also the place where it lies.
The same principle applies to Souvenir di montagna. The work arises from a precise constructive procedure. It has its own form, its own geometry and its own identity. Yet none of these characteristics is enough to determine its meaning completely. The place does the rest.
The same polyhedron, with the same faces and the same calibre, is not the same thing in a meadow next to a nursery school, on an Alpine pass or in an exhibition hall. Not because the object changes, but because what the object interrupts changes.
And here the rule of the erratic is more demanding than it seems. An erratic boulder is by definition out of place: it does not share the matter of the ground that hosts it, it does not belong to the geological history of the spot where it stopped. Its evidence derives from this discord. An erratic that harmonises perfectly with its surroundings ceases to be legible as an erratic: it becomes an outcrop, street furniture, decoration.
Choosing the place is therefore not a matter of composition. One does not look for the spot where the object looks good. One looks for the spot where the object remains foreign enough to be seen, and not so foreign as to be rejected. It is a difficult measure, and there is no method. It depends on how much foreignness a place can absorb without expelling it and without swallowing it.
One fact remains, and it concerns all the boulders in this story. For more than twenty thousand years no one chose where to put them.
Then someone began to.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Simulation for an installation in the hills near Pisa
© Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Simulation No. 3
© Archivio Umberto Cavenago