Cleanland, 2015
Site-specific installation, Colonia Ex Villaggio Eni di Corte di Cadore, Borca di Cadore (Bl) (IT).

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Cleanland, 2015, dust, environmental dimension, Colonia ex Villaggio Eni di Corte di Cadore, Borca di Cadore (Bl) (IT) 2015. Ph: Giacomo De Donà
7, 8, 9, 10, 11, Cleanland, 2015, dust, environmental dimension, Colonia ex Villaggio Eni di Corte di Cadore, Borca di Cadore (Bl) (IT) 2015.

Cleanland is a site-specific work created during the Progettoborca residency at the Eni village of Borca di Cadore (Belluno, IT): a visionary architectural project built in the late ’50s in a mountain village that nowadays hosts an artistic requalification project. The final outcome is an operation of reduction. It appears minimal, at the limit of what is visible and what is not, and it is inspired by the Edwin A. Abbott book Flatland: the tale of a bidimensional world and its social structure. The floorplan of the summer camp is superimposed onto the area dedicated to the showers for the former guests, through the negative space left by the dust.

Cleanland
To measure, to draw the architectural plan, scaled in the environment, to reflect on the ontology of the horizontal planes when they intersect the vertical ones and to find a coherent system for their transposition. And then to clean, clean the exterior of the re-drawn plan, but not its interior, where each and every fragment and layer and dust still lay in their places. To clean and to maintain, inside the white overall, like a technician in a nuclear power station who handles the bars of cadmium and boron to accelerate again, finally, the neutrons in the core of this not-exhausted power reactor, and the fuel today is really this, the energy of the idea in culture and in the arts, and this is how the nuclear fission could happen again, is happening, will happen.
The plan of the Colonia (summer camp) sticks to the ground and to the walls (crossing the vertical planes, where the plan crosses them). What is outside the reported perimeter is cleaned. What is inside stays as it is. It is possible to walk only outside. Silvia Hell works inside the changing rooms and the ladies’ showers of the Colonia (men’s showers, women’s showers, all is well split and organised by principles of efficiency here where, when the dog with six legs was still wagging its tail, bark!, more than 600 children and 200 other people were living together in the 30000 square meters city-building).
Gianluca D’Inca Levis, curator Progettoborca – Dolomiti Contemporanee


Cleanland, project, Progettoborca – Dolomiti Contemporanee
Cleanland, site-specific installation, Progettoborca – Dolomiti Contemporanee

1 - 10, Cleanland, project rendering

1 - 10, Colonia Ex Villaggio Eni di Corte di Cadore, Borca di Cadore (Bl) (IT). Ph: Nicola Noro

Silvia Hell © 2024 P.IVA: 02768790210