COSIMO VENEZIANO – L’ACQUA DEL 2000
Museomontagna presents the installation L’acqua del 2000, created by Turin-based artist Cosimo Veneziano and exhibited on the museum’s panoramic terrace.
The project, curated by Lorena Tadorni, is created as part of Art Site Fest, a festival dedicated to visual arts, storytelling and new writing, now in its tenth edition, dedicated to the themes of sustainability and the relationship with the natural environment.
The centerpiece of the installation is a sculpture with the features of a bearded man’s head inspired by the iconography of the Po Fountain in Turin’s Piazza CLN, created by Umberto Baglioni in 1936. Baglioni, who also created the Fountain of the Dora, chose to represent the two waterways in the form of human figures, respectively a man for the Po river and a woman for the Dora river, creating two works that are now part of the collective imagination of all Turin residents.
Cosimo Veneziano has always focused his practice on the development of drawing and sculpture in close connection with places. In this case, he starts from these suggestions to create a system of references that converge and branch off from the sculpture, immersed in a vase of water colored with ceramic pigments. The work is intended as an element “in progress” in which the human maker, paradoxically, after placement in the vase, does not fully contribute to its definition. It will be the atmospheric events that will do so: exposed to rain and changes in temperature, the sculpture may continue to be immersed in the liquid or be revealed to the public through evaporation. All around, covering the glass space of the skylight, a series of ceramic sculptures with reworked images of the flora and fauna of the Po.
With this installation, Cosimo Veneziano poetically reflects on the climatic crisis that is changing the morphology of our territory with disastrous effects, in close relation to the morphological element of the landscape that hosts it: the direct overlook of the Po River, which flows unconsciously just below the Museum’s terrace, and the mountains of the Alpine arc that stand out on the horizon.
