Palazzo delle Api

The site specific work is a a sculpture with an overturned pyramid form in Luserna stone, a local gray granite, with over 2300 holes of various diameters cut into the stone blocks.

The form, dimensions and material used for Palazzo delle Api are poised on the borderline between sculpture, architecture and environmental design. On the one hand, the serial array of inhabitable capsules suggests the structure of the buildings of the Japanese Metabolist movement in the 1960s, where form was based on science fiction imagery. On the other, the work addresses the urgent contemporary need to house and integrate populations forced to flee from countries torn by war. In this analogy with an exodus, the social aspect of the work is represented by the ecological necessity of protecting bees, which for some time have been threatened with extinction in spite of the fact that they are indispensable for our environment and its ecosystem, for the reproduction of plants and – as a result – the survival of the human race.