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Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, in Milan, hosts Lost Form, the Christoph Meier and Nicola Pecoraro exhibition organized by the itinerant gallery Ermes-Ermes. The show, open till February 12, is a constellation of long bamboo log, holded together thanks to various organic-appearance connectors. They were originally soft and warm, like wax or clay, but now — after a continued casting session during a short residence at Fonderia Battaglia — they are grey, hard, cold and sharp. However, these metallic objects, with their decorative oxidized patina, till testify their tactile origins, thanks to the hands artist track. The space, similar to a white cube, is a big and involving grid, in which mutable-coloured and light bamboo collide with the heavy and brute metallic nodes: where and which is the spectator space?
Atpdiary decided to interview Christoph Meier and Nicola Pecoraro.
ATP: How did your collaboration begin?
CM, NP: Our collaboration was the natural outcome of a series of connections and contrasts between each other’s way of working; with each new piece we seem to investigate a different aspect of this paradigm; it also gradually became a new way of creating problems and/or solving them
ATP: This installation is strongly tied to the exhibition space. Can you tell me how this collaborative piece was born? Did you have a particular inspiration source?
CM, NP: It was a combination between our individual practices, where each specific influence was finely tuned or discarded in order to achieve a balance. The main source was the space in the Fonderia Battaglia where the work is installed; it has a very defined character, and we built on our response to that.
ATP: “Lost Form”: what does this title refer to?
CM, NP: The title came forward for both pragmatic and material reasons: it refers to a certain process of bronze casting and also, as wordplay, it hints at the nature of the work itself and its various vicissitudes.
ATP: Could you give a brief account on the experience of working in a bronze foundry?
CM, NP: A very interesting experience; to learn about each specific stage in the creation of a physical work in such an environment, and the human relation dynamics which interweave in it.
ATP: The encounter between bronze and bamboo is decidedly a bizzarre one. How do you motivate combining such disparate materials?
CM, NP: This was the result of a series of thoughts the nature of a material like bronze, which we could define as “classical”, and something totally antipodean like bamboo, or in this case, reeds (canne) sourced in Sicily; they can each refer to sculpture and architecture, respectively, both in a primordial sense, and this is the link between the two. On the other hand, the contrast between the two materials was immediately apparent and very attractive in a formal sense.
ATP: Why should the space that hosts “Lost Form” be considered as cinematic?
CM, NP: We used the term “cinematic”, because we see the spectator of this piece as the activator of a latent narrative which is embedded within the sculpture. We always imagined the installation viewed as a long one-take camera sequence.
