Etra is a temporary exhibition dealing with the topic of climate change. The works on display are installations and sculptures made from recycled material, with video art interventions.
The works on display are each closely linked to the history of the materials from which they were created. They consist of found objects discovered at the exhibition sites, which are now given new life. The aim? To show what often remains hidden and discarded. One that Maddalena Mora has set herself - she is the in-house artist at the Eden Roc Hotel and curator and facilitator of ETRA.
The installations are based on a wide variety of methods and art forms: Vertically arranged surfaces of recycled paper full of memories of their past meet here with projections of metaphysical geometries, which, like technically staged auroras, loom over mighty icebergs of recycled plastic. Hotel shop windows are transformed into miniature digital stages and thus into chambers of wonder through which the intangible is expressed in the spectacle of these immobile objects armoured with abundance.
This multifaceted and interdisciplinary course focuses our gaze towards an unstable future and encourages a sensitive examination of natural equilibria and cycles to which everything inevitably returns: we, art, nature and time itself.
The design is linear and runs across the spaces staged by means of the various installations and works of visual art. The catalogue is printed on recycled paper, all background information can be accessed via QR codes.
A graduate of the Academy of Flower Design in Zurich, her work combines a love of nature and plants with a fascination for sculpture, which she cultivated during her studies at Milan's Brera Academy of Art. She currently works as a floral decorator and curates the artistic design of the Hotel Eden Roc Ascona.
She cooperates with the Istituto Internazionale di Architettura i2a in Lugano and teaches visual arts at the Scuola d'Arte Mimesi in Locarno.
Roberto Mucchiut is a digital and multimedia artist with training in computer science, photography, video, music and sound design. His interest in electroacoustic music, video art and techniques for the realisation of art installations and interactive theatre productions (especially using video projectors and video mapping techniques) inspires him. He regularly cooperates with other artists in the context of theatre projects as well as projects in the fields of contemporary dance, music and visual art.
The Dimitri Theatre Academy (Accademia Teatro Dimitri) is a theatre college based in Verscio, just a few kilometres from Locarno. The Accademia's curriculum includes courses in physical theatre, a three-year theatre degree programme leading to a Bachelor of Arts and another to a Master of Arts with three specialisations: Physical Theatre, Puppet Theatre and Applied Theatre Practice. The school is affiliated with the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland SUPSI.
The object has always been a subject of special interest for many artists throughout the centuries. Still life as a theme has often changed in meaning depending on the historical reasons of the artist; from its aesthetic interpretation to its didactic use, from its metaphysical value to its exaltation of the object, in contrast. In this work, we find a large surface made ofrecycled paper panels exclusively from the menus of various outlets that the artist has recovered directly on the spot.
Wunderkammern are rooms for the presentation of collectibles and rarities. The objects on display were intended to cause admiration, which is why they were also called mirabilia. In this series of artworks, several elements are juxtaposed, including found objects, luxury showcases and video art. In the new context, miraculous artifacts Mirabilia Artificialia are created from waste, which form the framework for seven different performance videos. Here, master's students from the Accademia Dimitri address climate change.
We are far from the geometric harmony of the Platonic Solids, linked to the four fundamental elements described by Empedocles. In the installation Lost Elements, the images of the original elements, used to generate the videos, are lost in an enthralling Chaos. Like our fast-changing contemporary world, the four elements move incessantly in search of a new balance, a new harmony. Learn more 🠖
According to the Swiss Glacier Measurement Network GLAMOS, these lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016, and another 12% of it between 2016 and 2021. The objects shown in this series of works are a mixture of video art and sculpture. In the center of the room is a replica of the famous Matterhorn in the form of a transparent, fragile and at the same time enormously durable sculpture made of recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET), more than two meters high, which could frighteningly outlive the motif it embodies.
This is a new work as a continuation of the research cycle on the theme of time. The installation is composed of 15 videos of different lengths (1 to 5 minutes) and lasts about 45 minutes in total. The videos are played in a predetermined sequence and in alternation. All videos deal with natural motifs (landscapes, forests, sky, etc.) in which the relationship between time and space is clarified using techniques of spatial structuring and the manipulation of the passage of time (delays or accelerations).
Leonardo da Vinci wrote in the sixth book of his Treatise of Painting, entitled Of Trees and Green Plants, "Nature has so arranged the leaves of the last branches of many plants that the sixth leaf is above the first. And so it continues, if this rule is not interrupted." It seems remarkable here that millions of years before the appearance of man, nature already follows one of the most important laws of harmony in the entire history of art, namely the golden ratio. The work consists of recyclable bottles from which wafer-thin sheets of glass are cut and subsequently positioned in a spiral around a metal bolt about 7 meters long.
In Greek mythology, the Pegaeae are described as nymphs and guardians of the springs. For the ancestors of our culture, every watercourse had a mythological relationship with its origin. This is comparable to the scientific conception of the water cycle, in which this relationship is described in terms of the interactions existing in a closed system of exchange and renewal based on interconnected containers and changing states of the fluids. The present work is about an eighteen-meter-long tarpaulin made of recycled Tetrapaks, which, after a waterfall-like fall from the roof of the building facing the garden, winds like a motionless river over the ground below.
The close connection between life and death weaves a bond to our entire past, which is carried into the future and enables our coexistence between light and darkness, summer and winter, and life and death. The work represents a winding path that completely occupies the exhibition space. Lying on the floor are petroleum lacquered bone scraps, flower bulbs and roots. The varnish conceals the essence of the objects used, blending the concept of a natural cycle without beginning or end into a unified "mass," transporting the viewer into a past-less and future-less time in the face of the beauty of life, if it is preserved.
Go back