Plinths for Living Statues
2017
CATEGORY
Work-element
AREA OF INTERVENTION
Lake Casanuova (Renai di Signa, Florence).
The area is located within the Site of Community Importance (SCI), Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and Special Protection Area (SPA) of the Stagni della Piana Fiorentina e Pratese (Natura 2000 code IT5140011).
TYPE OF INTERVENTION
The artwork was created and installed with the contribution of volunteers (social art intervention).
WORK STATUS
Completed (September 2017).
AUTHORITIES/AGENCIES INVOLVED
– Committee for the WWF Oases of the Florence area
– L’Isola dei Renai S.p.A.
MAIN BIOINDICATORS USED TO MONITOR THE ECOLOGICAL FUNCTIONALITY OF THE WORK-ELEMENT
– Herons, with particular reference to night herons (Nycticorax nycticorax), little egrets (Egretta garzetta), cattle egrets (Bubulcus ibis), squacco herons (Ardeola ralloides) and great white egrets (Casmerodius albus).
– Cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo).
Plinths for Living Statues is a work-element. It is positioned within the work-site Enclosing with Water, where wet forest habitats have been created to form islands of different dimensions in an old, abandoned, flooded basin used as a gravel pit.
This artwork was conceived to attract large aquatic birds, especially colonial herons. Since ancient times, these birds have always fascinated people because of their flight and their extremely slow movements, but most of all because of their hieratic posture when they are standing still.
While the vast work-site ensures the preservation of a suitable habitat for the heron colony, Plinths for Living Statues provides fundamental supports where birds can “perch on the water” among the islands.
The presence of herons on this site is the cornerstone and the very reason for the entire intervention. The artwork is therefore completed with the figure of the herons that pervade the site and alight there. The work-element only defines the specific point and a suitable support so that these living beings can be more easily presented to the observer. With these emblematic figures, the dynamic of life is displayed in its enchanted pause and then in its slow and harmonious departure.
As highlighted by the title of this work, the artist’s gesture is “limited” to the act of creating the plinths for the statues. It is therefore a declaration that the statues, being alive, can only exist in real form. In other words, they cannot be represented in any “fiction”, but only evoked in their existential majesty. For the first time, the artistic act thus becomes the “renunciation of expression”, in tribute to the
incomparable beauty of real, natural life.