22. Forms that migrate
No erratic boulder belongs entirely to the place where it lies.
Its presence always bears witness to an elsewhere: a distant origin, a movement that has ended but can still be read in the form.
Souvenir di montagna is not a single work. There is no original erratic to replicate, no definitive form to reproduce. There is a score: a cube, eight vertices, eight truncations, and chance deciding the rest.
From that score have come so far two ten-centimetre erratics in PLA, No. 1 and No. 2, twelve tetrakaidecahedra, a jewel in white gold, two blocks of Swiss stone pine carried out by another hand, a Cor-Ten erratic that can be taken apart and reassembled, and two inhabitable shelters, in Lugano and at the Maloja. None is the same as another. They are relatives, not twins.
Like the boulders left by the ice ages, they occupy different places without losing their bond with the movement that generated them. The first shelter came down to the city, at two hundred and seventy metres, in the garden of a nursery school. The second went back up to the pass, at eighteen hundred metres, below the fortress that watched over the border.
The project does not move towards a final form. Each new location adds a variant and tests the form’s capacity to enter into a relationship with a place.
Every erratic seems still. Every erratic goes on migrating. At least towards the places it has yet to reach.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
The fourteen-faced polyhedron, line drawing