13. Inside / Outside
Some forms are understood with the gaze. Others require movement.
A boulder generally belongs to the first category. It is observed from a certain distance. It is walked around. It is compared with the landscape around it. Its presence manifests itself as a relationship between volume, weight and position.
The constructed erratic introduces a different condition. The form is not exhausted by its own surface. It can be passed through.
Crossing a threshold seems a small thing, and it changes everything.
From outside, the boulder is an object among others, measured against the valley, the meadows, the houses: something one looks at. From inside it becomes the only thing there is, measured against the body of whoever has entered, and the landscape passes to the other side. One stops looking at the boulder and starts looking through the boulder.
The work does not coincide with the volume it occupies, but with the relationship it builds between inside and outside.
The same object thus has two sizes. One in relation to the mountain, the other in relation to a person. Neither is the true one.
Time changes too. Outside, the work is still and can be taken in at a single glance. Inside, the light coming through the openings shifts during the day, and the space is never the same two hours apart. Outside it is a volume; inside it is a duration.
It must be said that entering a boulder is not an absolute novelty.
At Foroglio one goes in under a boulder: the stone acts as a roof and the space is the one it leaves free. But that space does not belong to the boulder; it lies beside it. In the constructed erratic, by contrast, one enters the stone itself, a volume that was decided before the form existed.
It is the exact reverse of the natural process. In nature there is first the mass and then, possibly, the void that remains. Here there is first the void, and the mass is built around it.
Finally there is a consequence that no longer concerns the gaze.
A mass that can be passed through is a mass made of parts. It has a thickness, joints, an inside and an outside that someone had to hold together. And what has been put together can be taken apart.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
The interior of Souvenir di montagna.
The interior of Souvenir di montagna at the Maloja: light enters through the slits