Il Raggio
Jute cord and wooden house beams
800 x 100 x 600cm
RamificAZIONI 2022 AgriLandArt a cura di Francesca Manzini e Carlo Moretti | Novi di Modena | June 2022
We recreated Lawren’s 2019 piece from Artists in Nature (Neuhaus, Austria) for the AIA Folk Festival. The event was hosted by the Moretti family whose historic home was all but destroyed in the earthquake of May 2012. In fact, the town of Novi was at the epicenter of that quake. The Morettis rebuilt the villa and were finally able to move back this year, a full decade later.
We wanted to use material from the property for the installation and were lucky to find heavy wooden beams that had been salvaged from the original house.
We created tension by looping ropes around the higher branches of a tree, tying the ropes in such a way as to cradle the beams. These we had stood on end, leaning them away from the tree. The beams acted as an opposing force which then pulled the ropes taut and created the linear effect.
Many thanks to the AIA Folk festival, the Moretti family for their hospitality (and cold drinks!), artist Carlo Moretti for organizing the show, artists Luca Gemma and Davide Ghiacci, our neighbors in the exhibition who built an incredible army of scarecrows, and artists Luciana Soriato and Domenico Scolaro for their encouragement.
