On the top of a hill in Peccioli, Tuscany, was inaugurated Breath, a ten-metre permanent kinetic sculpture by the artist Emiliano Ponzi. The work, made of satin steel, has a mechanical flower that opens at dawn and closes at sunset. Around, a series of metal elements rotates continuously, reflecting light, sky, wind and landscape.
Breath was developed together with the former designer Dario Spinelli, curated by Cristiano Seganfreddo, editor of Flash Art, and entered the MACCA collection, the Museum in Cielo Open of Peccioli. Peccioli is a small Tuscan town that over the years has also used the resources generated by its waste management system to finance public art, architecture and cultural projects spread over the territory.
Ponzi, known above all for his work as an illustrator and visual artist, has collaborated with international realities and brands and in recent years has expanded his practice to installations, painting, sculpture and projects in space. With him we talked about Breath, the relationship between art and landscape, the Peccioli model and what happens when a work leaves the artist’s study and becomes part of the daily life of a place.
Let’s start with Breath. Before the work, however, there is Peccioli. What do you need to know to understand this project?
I would start right from the place, because without that context history does not really begin. Peccioli managed to build a system, the so-called Peccioli System, also linked to the company Belvedere, of which many citizens are members. The profits are reinvested in the territory, both in services to citizens and in art.
From there is also the MACCA, the Museum in Cielo Open of Peccioli, of which Breath is part. It is important to say, because we are talking about one of Europe’s most important open-air museums. For the inauguration we also invited the executive director of Storm King, in the state of New York, which is a gigantic open-air museum, where you can also cycle. Peccioli is another thing, it is smaller, clearly, but the parallelism between these two worlds was interesting.
So yes, before the work there is this: a will to enrich the territory through art, but also economic availability to do so. If one of the two things is missing, the game doesn’t work.
What path did you take to the final form of the work?
Born from a conversation with Mayor Renzo Macelloni. We were on the terrace of the town hall, looking at these hills and we imagined something could stand on the profile of one of those hills. Two and a half years later, that thing happened.
We made it with Dario Spinelli, who is experiential designer, and with the care of Cristiano Seganfreddo, editor of Flash Art. We started from the idea of building an artificial element that represented a natural subject, but within a natural environment: the Tuscan hills, the grass, the flowers, the morning fog, the haze, the sunsets.
I was interested in keeping these two floors together: on the one hand an artificial object, on the other the landscape. From an aesthetic and also conceptual point of view. The idea was to create an installation that was related to the landscape, but also with people.
Emiliano Ponzi e Daniele Spinelli accanto all’opera | (BREATH/Andrea Testi)
There are those who could look at it and simply see a metal object in the middle of the countryside.
Yeah, sure. And it’s a fair comment. When you do a communicative act, whether it is a speech on a stage or an artistic installation, you must accept that another person may not understand, or may interpret in his own way what you have done.
Then social comment often is a belly comment. But we should understand the context: because that thing was done in which system, with what intention.
I also say that because it happens to me. I walk into a gallery, I see something I don’t like and I think: Madonna, this is terrible, I don’t understand why she’s here and not in a trash bucket. But at the same time I realize that there is an ambivalence. On the one hand, it’s fair to recognize that something sucks to you if you suck. On the other hand, if you want to try to understand, you have to take a step towards those who did that act of communication.
Then you can even fool and think it’s bad. In ninety percent of the cases I do it too. But at least you know that there is also the other passage.
The main mechanism of the work is a flower that opens at dawn and closes at sunset. But he’s not put right in front of his eyes. It’s almost hidden. Why?
On the one hand there is the reason why we did it: to create an artifact that represented nature. It seems a contradiction, because you are looking at a giant flower of metal, bulky, heavy, made of many quintals of steel, which reflects light. However, by contrast, that artificial representation can make you rediscover the true nature.
The flower is hidden, or however masked, by a series of metal petals built on a kind of double ball of meridians. These petals turn continuously and protect the flower. There is a game I see and I do not see.
And that protection is not just formal. It also represents a responsibility: the idea that people should protect nature, or at least recognize that protection is something that concerns them.
Dario Spinelli, compared to design, 3d and all virtual tests, how much the final result was faithful? How much was the experience experienced by visitors as previously imagined?
Dario Spinelli: virtual design has become an integral part of the process of creation of the work: through a continuous iteration of digital prototypes we have been able to shape, with great precision, the ideas that emerged, adapting them away to the limits of physical reality, visualizing forms that otherwise would risk to remain intangible. That is why I consider a nice compliment to hear that the renderings are identical to the final result.
With regard to the experience, however, reality has surpassed any anticipation: the size of the sculpture and the slow pace of its movements give it a hypnotic quality that haunted me already as it was taking shape, and that I saw also enchanting visitors.
Does the choice of satin steel go in the direction of the protection of the work?
Yes, and then the satin steel is one of the few materials, besides the pure mirror, which gives you a reflection. It reflects light, but also colors. So there is also an aspect of camouflage. If the day is grey, the work reflects the gray of the sky and becomes more mimetic. If there is a very bright day, it reflects the sun, the blue sky, the green grass. Somehow it changes with what it has around.
Breath in una vista panoramica | (BREATH/Andrea Testi)
You are known above all as an illustrator, so as one who works on the page, on the image, on a two-dimensional form. Here instead there is a work ten meters high, in the landscape. Is this a new step for you?
Yeah, even though I had already started adding more modules to my job over the years. I participated in a group in Shanghai, at the K11 Museum, where there was an installation in which things happened. Then, always in Shanghai, for a personal exhibition at Sunke Villa, I designed and made some sculptures.
In 2024 I realized with Accurat and DGI, with which I share the study, a great sculpture for Milan Design Week. It was called Under the Surface, it occupied an area of about 400 square meters and was thought as a submerged island.
Then I also did painting exhibitions, between 2023 and 2024, and over the years I wrote books: both illustrated, like that for the MoMA on the metro map, and more related to writing, as an essay on creativity published by Corraini.
At some point I think there are things you want to say, but to tell her you need different words, or different language codes. The language of illustration, in some cases, is no longer enough. You have to learn a new language to better communicate things that you cannot say in the other language.
But Breath is not a temporary installation. Stay there. And it remains in a municipality of about five thousand inhabitants. What is the relationship between the work and the people living in Peccioli?
I hope you become one of them. Peccioli has about five thousand inhabitants, but also has many visitors every year, people coming to see the works and installations. But the point, for me, is that we left it there. From that moment he no longer belongs to us, he belongs to them.
Everyone will build a personal relationship with the work. Maybe there’ll be a group of guys who’ll meet there in the evening to smoke a cigarette in secret. Then maybe it’s not even true, because the sculpture is illuminated and the parents go to pick them up right away. But here, I am interested in that idea: that everyone finds a way to stay close to us.
Maybe they won’t even call her Breath. Maybe they will call it “the flower”, or “the metal circle”, or another way. That’s okay. From the name they will give them, from the use they will make, from how they will tell a friend who comes from another country, the work will become something of them. A few days before the inauguration we saw that some doves were making a nest inside the flower. Then, with all the attention of the case, we had to remove it, because it would be dangerous. But it was a very nice sign.
At the end of the day, nature takes things back. And also people’s habit does the same thing. A landscape work becomes what people say that it is, how they look at it, how they use it, how they tell it. We do things, we put them on a boat, we let them go and then they become part of everything. I think the interesting part is that.
L’articolo Emiliano Ponzi and the mechanical flower born on the Tuscan hills proviene da IlNewyorkese.
