Christoph Meier / Nicola Pecoraro at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia

Excerpt from a conversation between the curator Pieternel Vermoortel and the artists.

Lost Form
Fragments from a conversation dispersed through space, material and reference.

An encounter with the sculpture through an imposed navigation: you enter a room, then another room, to finally be free to move around in a non-linear fashion. Look at a detail – see the entire constellation – come back to the detail.

Lets engage with this in a filmic manner: a one-take endless tracking shot that keeps revealing until something like a whole is perceived. The space itself might be considered a movie set: in its various degrees of appearance, it fades like a gradient from a perhaps comically post-apocalyptic slash run-down to a clean white cube akin environment. Through these spaces, the sculpture, existing by self-repetition, stands still.

The grid: made of bamboo or the most immediately available local substitute. It is stable in its structure though mutable in color. As it drys it turns from bright green to light brown, to yellow, to grey.
The shapes holding the grid together also sustain themselves. A confusing quarrel over which is supporting what, what is displaying and what is being displayed. A decision ultimately made by the viewer – what evokes his balancing position between navigator, performer, spectator.

The connectors, an organic appearance, testify their tactile origins. They stand as relics of their own creation strengthened by their decorative oxidized patina. Ones soft and warm to touch, almost liquid, but now hard, cold and sharp. They are brute nodes of a grid, possibly heavier in weight than what they are being supported by/supporting.
The grid is ignorant – it disregardedly inhabits and positions the space, the walls and other partitions just left to be perforated.

This work / untitled was produced through a continued casting session during a stay at the Fonderia Battaglia. And while outlining this emptiness it asks: What makes an object and what unmakes it?