After an extensive five-year restoration carried out by David Chipperfield Architects and Generali, the iconic Procuratie Vecchie in St. Mark's Square has opened again to the city, with an installation by Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi. Titled "Monumento", the artwork responds to the new socially-driven functions presented by the vast space, "renewing the language of the monumental column and the values to which society aspires in order to reflect its own epoch".
For the first time in 500 years, the location is revealed with a new social purpose, further defined by the opening of The Human Safety Net foundation's new home – a global NGO movement in which volunteers and partners work with people living in vulnerable circumstances. The column is conceived in collaboration with Carlotta Franco and GICO Studio, and is set within the space that contains the staircase of Procuratie Vecchie. Its proportions compliment the space around it, allowing the visitor to explore it from different perspectives: by climbing the stairs to see it in its entirety, or from its base to the summit which triggers a conceptual shift.
Monumento is a song that leaves out function to ritualize a thought through a plastic act. The history of people is an inherited flow of rhetorical figures that cyclically recur; they redefine their meanings and establish symbolisms that we have not only learned to read but which, generation after generation, we have absorbed as a kind of latent language of the collective unconscious. Thus, by stripping a monument of its symbolism, what remains is a virtuous and melancholic lyrical song, detached and solemn, yet in search of contact because it was created to express itself, to be first an artefact and a gesture, and then concept and presence.-- Edoardo Tresoldi
The installation explores how a society that recognizes its own fragility is naturally inclined to accept and integrate its historical, existential, and metaphorical components that constitute it. By condensing past and present into a contemporary narrative, Tresoldi converts the rhetoric of the monument into anti-rhetoric, by proposing an "imperfect completeness that dematerializes the colossal in ethereal", and accompanies the sequences of everyday life. Monumento constructs harmony through a heterogeneous expression of the coexistence of different elements and the reappropriation of an evolving world to construct of a more conscious future.
The iconic Procuratie Vecchie alongside Saint Mark’s Square has undergone a vast renovation by David Chipperfield Architects and Generali. Instead of a single architectural intervention, David Chipperfield Architects Milan developed a series of Interventions that address the complexity of the work through a flexible approach in order to interpret and make sense of both historical modifications and practical adaptations of the Procuratie Vecchie.
