The idea is here
Objets trouvés
Along the Po embankment, the landscape never presents itself as a neutral backdrop, but as an active repository of forms, remains and operative possibilities. The elements that inhabit it do not belong to a completed order: they seem rather to be materials already prepared, fragments of a constructive grammar floating between water and land in a state of permanent availability.
Vessels that once carried people and goods, pile-dwelling structures and makeshift architecture, floating houses suspended between infrastructure and survival: everything appears as part of an already existing technical-poetic lexicon, which precedes the intervention and at the same time prompts it. These are not evocations, but operative presences, devices that have already experienced instability as a form of habitability.
In this context, the idea of construction does not coincide with production from scratch, but with a practice of reactivation. The elements encountered along the river present themselves as materials already “thought through”, already tested by a history of use that has made them available for new configurations. It is in this sense that the landscape becomes an open archive, a field of latent possibilities.
Here, the objets trouvés do not take on the dimension of anecdote or chance discovery, but that of an underlying coherence. Their appearance does not interrupt the discourse; it makes it possible. They are fragments which, in their state of apparent decontextualisation, amount to forms of inspiration that are no longer romantic but structural: not a flash, but a condition.
The river landscape thus emerges as a continuous threshold between what has been and what can still be activated. An unstable system of traces, where the idea does not precede the form, but recognises it at the very moment it emerges from its context.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
House, boat, water
Il ready-made, l'oggetto che già c'è
Le piene del Po tracciate con un segno e l'anno
