brickstones 2015 - ongoing
Brickstones is a research project about the presence and meaning of brick debris in the environment, traces of disappeared buildings.
I started this research by accident in the spring of 2015, along the banks of the Clyde estuary, downstream of Glasgow. The stimulus was born where the remains of a distillery and a refinery, especially bricks, are scattered along the coast, altered and moved by the sea, freed from human control, now under the influence of nature and of the cycles and the transformations that imposes.
I continued the research in Nure Valley (where I live) in the river bed, where you can collect similar brick debris (a phenomenon that I note in all anthropic places where I try to look for them. The debris are mixed with natural stones and in the same way they are placed, oriented by the flood’s current, like the sand-stone and marl-stones around them. They are stones, smoothed and rounded. Red. They are brick-stones. And they are everywhere. I collect and gather them in some points of the river bed to watch them, to make their presence perceptible.
I took away some of them and I made installations outside the context of the river, such as missing piece, for which I used a fragment of wall made of various bricks still attached by lime, polished by the river until it took the shape of a rounded stone. They are particularly fascinating, in equilibrium on the edges of meaning.
The brickstone is waste? Is it something finite, or does it continue to live? Fascinating for memory that they enclose.
Are they waste or archaeological findings of a more or less recent past? However, the evidence of a destruction, violent or not. Each collected fragment makes us thinking about its original location and function as a wall brick , roof tile, pavement...
Is it something that remains, or something that is transformed? Is it an artificial thing or is it a given thing?
In may 2017 I have been called to be a tutor of one of the workshops organised by Paesaggi migranti in Pennabilli (Emilia Romagna Region, Italy). The workshop was called “Fragments” and it has been based on brickstones research concept. "Fragments" is also a temporary exhibition at Museo Renzi, San Giovanni in Galilea (FC).