Cerimonia is the first site-specific installation realized by TRAC – Tresoldi Academy, the school created in collaboration between STUDIO STUDIO STUDIO, the interdisciplinary lab founded by Edoardo Tresoldi to create and support contemporary art projects and YAC – Young Architects Competitions, an architecture academy that trains young designers by allowing them to work with the world’s foremost architecture studios.
The installation, realized in the area home to the former Mercatone Uno store in Bologna, is promoted and supported by Urban Up | Unipol, with the scientific collaboration of G124 – the group created at the behest of Senator Renzo Piano to conduct constant, ongoing research on the subject of peripheral areas – and the extraordinary consultation of Stefano Mancuso, Italian botanist and essayist, director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.
Cerimonia, a 5.3-metre-tall wire mesh structure made from materials and soil found on the site of the former Mercatone store, is the result of the joint work of Tresoldi and 15 young students of the Academy – selected in July 2020 from more than 500 applications received from all over the world – who under Tresoldi’s artistic direction imagined and built a site-specific project for the former store area. The area, owned by Gruppo Unipol, in 2021 will be redeveloped after 10 years of abandon.
“Cerimonia breathes life into a presence capable of expressing itself through its cyclical nature, interjecting itself into the process that already animates the space. By coexisting with the state of neglect of the area for about a year, the project will therefore harmoniously blend this process with a celebration of architecture,” said Edoardo Tresoldi.
In addition, Cerimonia is designed to communicate with the area’s biological phenomena. Soil from the site has been collected and integrated into the work; over time, vegetation will cover the installation, redefining the architecture’s forms. The process of transforming natural phenomena is at the heart of the work as a ceremony of dialogue between architecture, nature and the passage of time.
The celebratory language of classical architecture fuses with the materials and languages of the original space, as well as with the transformative processes of abandonment, giving rise to an unprecedented, new narrative.
Stefano Mancuso said: “Nature needs to take over the city, so I find Cerimonia extremely fascinating and educational because it is a manifestation of how one might imagine architecture. It is like imagining an ideal city in 2050 that no longer follows the Renaissance model; rather, it is a city of human thought, with nature perfectly free to circulate within it. The real revolution is changing the idea of cities: if we were to cover our cities with greenery, with plants, we could solve the problem of global pollution immediately.”
