The ethereal archi-art of Edoardo Tresoldi lands on the seaside of Reggio Calabria

Edoardo Tresoldi explores the poetics of the dialogue between man and landscape using architecture as an expressive tool and a key to interpret the place. 

The Italian artist plays with the transparency of the wire mesh and with industrial materials to transcend the space-time dimension and narrate a dialogue between art and the world, through a visual synthesis that is revealed by dissolving the physical limits.

Since 2013 he has been making environmental installations focusing his research on the study of landscape languages. He has presented his works in public spaces, archaeological contexts, art parks, festivals and exhibitions around the world. 

In 2016 he carried out the restoration of the early Christian Basilica of Siponto in Italy and was awarded the 2018 Gold Medal for Italian Architecture – Special Client Award, the most prestigious Italian architecture award established by the Milan Triennale.

In 2018 he created Etherea for the Coachella Festival in the USA, one of the most important and anticipated musical events in the world.

Interested in original urban interventions? Have a look at The colorful & engaging street architecture of 100Architects

Opera: a monument for contemplation

During the opening weekend on the 12th of September 2020, there was a series of events with free music, performances and poetry. 

The musician and composer Teho Teardo presented a sound installation that narrated the fusion between Opera and the place through sound created in different moments of the day: morning, sunset and night. 

In addition, there were poetic incursions by the poet and writer Franco Arminio and there was also an exceptional concert from the well-known Calabrian singer-songwriter Brunori Sas, winner of the Tenco 2020 award.

Opera was created to celebrate the relationship between the place and human beings through a classical architectural language and the transparency of the Absent Matter, expressed through the wire mesh. 

The open architecture – consisting of 46 columns reaching 8 meters in height, within a park of 2,500 square meters – offers a new monument that is fully accessible to citizens and visitors. 

The installation is part of one of the largest European public spaces and is proposed as a new landmark of the territory.

Opera is a monument for contemplation through which the place defines itself. Tresoldi plays with the composition of classical architecture and transparency to seek out new visual poetics in dialogue with the surrounding landscape and visitors. The columns, founding archetypes of the Western cultural heritage, make up a stately frame that gives the park an additional interpretation.

The installation outlines an agora that transports visitors into a changing perceptual dimension through plays of height and depth with the park. In the interior, Opera shows several directions within a space already materially open: the corridors run towards the landscape while the transparent columns define an architecture that welcomes, accompanies and marks the experience of the place, establishing a direct relationship between earth and sky.

The columns and trees create a rhythmic balance of light and shadows in an organic correspondence between transparency and the surrounding space. The outlines of Opera lose definition when merging with the context as it is impossible to “stop the shadow that will exist in any case, like an echo to the sound”, as Arturo Martini states.

Opera also gives shape to Tresoldi’s reflections on architectural composition and decomposition: the dialogue between the installation and the place is manifested in the distributive logic of the colonnade that does not completely adapt to that of the park. Similar to a counterpoint in music, this overlapping works like two different melodies heard at the same time: crossing the park the visitor encounters harmonies and disharmonies between the two architectural systems.

Would you like to see more public spaces installations? You might like “Mi casa, your casa” and the timeless essence of connection by Héctor Esrawe and Ignacio Cadena

As a public artwork, Opera makes explicit the relation between reality and representation, entrusting the transparency of Absent Matter with the primary role of space-time suspension. The installation integrates the relation between visible and invisible, individual and collective, deepening into the stratification of ancestral horizons and daily practices, on the edge of physical and mental terrain, balanced between art, architecture and landscape.

Opera is Tresoldi’s second installation in Calabria after Il Collezionista di Venti in Pizzo in 2013 and the second major permanent public work in Italy after the Basilica of Siponto in Puglia, commissioned by MiBACT in 2016.