Just for a drop
L'escaut, Bruxelles
2018
Vitalist, often organic, aiming at an ecological aesthetic and an economy of the means and materials of production, circular and involutionary, confining to self-sufficiency, the work of Alberto Scodro aspires to transcend and even generate its own creative matter.
It is also a work that tells about flow and circulation, transformation and mutation. Oscillating between hubris and modesty, it unfolds by engaging a dialectic between the different tensions it generates or allows us to see: between the organic and the mineral, the industrial and the artifact, the vertical and the horizontal, control and surrender...
All these elements are found in the installation specifically designed for the site of L’Escaut Architectures, cooperative of architects founded by Olivier Bastin in 1989.
Alberto Scodro responded to L’Escaut’s invitation to conceive a work for their site with a radical proposal: to completely divert the circuit from the circulation of central heating, transforming the building - the time of an exhibition – similarly to a gigantic architectural coffee machine acting both, metaphorically and efficiently, on a series of pre-baked plates made out of melted sand and mineral. This proposal was made, intuition or premonitory coincidence, before learning about that at the time L’Escaut had been transformed into a warehouse to store coffee...
His intervention brings the entire building into a vertical tension, apprehending it as a living organism from which it would divert the vital fluid and redirect it towards a new production, generating a new experience.
Contrasting with the horizontality of the ground floor display, this vertical hijacking transforming the former hoist of the warehouse into a "sculptural shower" finds an acoustic counterpoint in the air vent located at the back of the building which Scodro uses as a vector for broadcasting recordings made on site, referring to the circulation of the users of the site.
On the first floor, the forest of radiators translated in order to prepare for the drop in percolation responds to the upward momentum suggested by the ginkgos bilobas, the trees that Scodro cultivates in his country, and which have been carefully potted in patched terracotta vases previously used to melt the sculptures displayed on the ground floor.
One of these ginkgos, prehistoric tree also known for its qualities of vasodilator/fluidifier of blood circulation, is planted in the middle of the courtyard and will remain at L’Escaut where it will quietly pursue its growth.
A final note about these sculptural fusions which resort to a variety of raw materials, from more or less recognizable mundane objects or waste from our industrial societies to semi-precious ores, to which Scodro gives a new life and new radiance.
Composites, both organic and industrial in their constituents, these fusions crystallize this dialectic aspiration which runs through the work of Scodro and structures his commitment both on an artistic and socio-political level: this belief in the possibility to assimilate, metabolize, literally and figuratively, the rejection and the precious, the rare and the innocuous, the mineral and the organic, in order to make it, beyond the intriguing aesthetic forms revealed by his sculptures, the promise of a possible future, an allegory of a planet hopefully able to reinvent itself.
Emmanuel Lambion
2018
Vitalist, often organic, aiming at an ecological aesthetic and an economy of the means and materials of production, circular and involutionary, confining to self-sufficiency, the work of Alberto Scodro aspires to transcend and even generate its own creative matter.
It is also a work that tells about flow and circulation, transformation and mutation. Oscillating between hubris and modesty, it unfolds by engaging a dialectic between the different tensions it generates or allows us to see: between the organic and the mineral, the industrial and the artifact, the vertical and the horizontal, control and surrender...
All these elements are found in the installation specifically designed for the site of L’Escaut Architectures, cooperative of architects founded by Olivier Bastin in 1989.
Alberto Scodro responded to L’Escaut’s invitation to conceive a work for their site with a radical proposal: to completely divert the circuit from the circulation of central heating, transforming the building - the time of an exhibition – similarly to a gigantic architectural coffee machine acting both, metaphorically and efficiently, on a series of pre-baked plates made out of melted sand and mineral. This proposal was made, intuition or premonitory coincidence, before learning about that at the time L’Escaut had been transformed into a warehouse to store coffee...
His intervention brings the entire building into a vertical tension, apprehending it as a living organism from which it would divert the vital fluid and redirect it towards a new production, generating a new experience.
Contrasting with the horizontality of the ground floor display, this vertical hijacking transforming the former hoist of the warehouse into a "sculptural shower" finds an acoustic counterpoint in the air vent located at the back of the building which Scodro uses as a vector for broadcasting recordings made on site, referring to the circulation of the users of the site.
On the first floor, the forest of radiators translated in order to prepare for the drop in percolation responds to the upward momentum suggested by the ginkgos bilobas, the trees that Scodro cultivates in his country, and which have been carefully potted in patched terracotta vases previously used to melt the sculptures displayed on the ground floor.
One of these ginkgos, prehistoric tree also known for its qualities of vasodilator/fluidifier of blood circulation, is planted in the middle of the courtyard and will remain at L’Escaut where it will quietly pursue its growth.
A final note about these sculptural fusions which resort to a variety of raw materials, from more or less recognizable mundane objects or waste from our industrial societies to semi-precious ores, to which Scodro gives a new life and new radiance.
Composites, both organic and industrial in their constituents, these fusions crystallize this dialectic aspiration which runs through the work of Scodro and structures his commitment both on an artistic and socio-political level: this belief in the possibility to assimilate, metabolize, literally and figuratively, the rejection and the precious, the rare and the innocuous, the mineral and the organic, in order to make it, beyond the intriguing aesthetic forms revealed by his sculptures, the promise of a possible future, an allegory of a planet hopefully able to reinvent itself.
Emmanuel Lambion
