Arthur Duff / Nathalie Junod Ponsard
25 Mar 2011 - 31 Dec 2012
ARTHUR DUFF / NATHALIE JUNOD PONSARD
Concorso MACRO 2%
25 March 2011 - 31 December 2012
Roma Capitale, Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali e Centro Storico – Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali and MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma are proud to present the winners of the MACRO 2% competition: “Rope” by Arthur Duff and “Orizzonte Galleggiante” by Nathalie Junod Ponsard.
Exploiting the potential of light – the Competition’s theme – Arthur Duff (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1973) and Nathalie Junod Ponsard (Compiegne, France, 1961) offer the Museum and its visitors two public art installations. With a new approach to space, they transform transit areas into a meeting ground for the public and contemporary art to come together.
Rope, the work by Arthur Duff, consists of a red neon installation located in the fire-protection premises of the car park in addition to a laser projection onto the base of the glazed lifts. This can only be seen when the lifts are moving. The project links up the various levels of the Museum by joining the car park, the foyer, the first floor, and the large terrace in a continuous play of neon, laser, and movement. It will thus “connect and interlink the extremely discordant architectural forces, making them interact together.”
The neon words are a quotation from the first page of the script of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope: “The action of the story is continuous; there are no time lapses of any kind”, a message that foreshadows the visitors’ experience once they enter the glazed lifts, which is one of perceptive continuity and dialectic between observer and observed. Once inside the lifts, visitors will unconsciously become an active part of the work, observing the space from a unique position, but at the same time being observed themselves by those who are already in the Museum. Those outside will read another script projected onto the bottom of the lift: “Cat and rat cat and rat only who is the cat and who is the rat”, another quotation from Hitchcock’s film. This means that, when they enter the Museum and go through the premises, following this narrative sequence and the fixed neon lights, visitors will experience the action of a continuous, uninterrupted story, with the laser making them both subject and object in a sort of weird, unpredictable cat and rat chase.
Orizzonte Galleggiante (Floating Horizon), the work by Nathalie Junod Ponsard, is a LED installation in the stairwell that links the exterior of the new MACRO directly to the large terrace. The artist has created a luminous horizon of coloured LEDs which symbolically accompany visitors through the building, transforming this unusual space into a journey of intense, changing colours, counteracting the daring cuts and thrust of the architecture with a form of horizontality that is artificial and yet also alive and dynamic. The Museum staircase is thus opened up into a sweeping landscape in which the light constantly changes, creating dynamic atmospheres of unpredictable harmonies.
Ponsard’s horizon colours the great white walls of the staircase in ever-varying ways, with tones ranging from red to cyan, orange to indigo blue, and yellow to dark blue. The variable, floating light created by the installation gains even greater intensity when the sun goes down, enveloping the space and imaginarily taking the visitors who go through Odile Decq’s building towards an “other” place.
The artist describes the research she carried out for Orizzonte galleggiante, saying: “The horizon rises or falls – it’s a sort of level that appears in the space of the stairs. The museum has variable light conditions, making visitors lose their bearings in terms of height as they go up and down the stairs. The horizon shifts, as though MACRO were taking visitors to another place, in a vertical movement bathed in light that envelops the public. They will no longer know if they are going up or down, because the fields of light sway, floating unpredictably. The stairwell is constantly being reinvented and it offers no sense of direction, but on the contrary introduces a new dimension to the place... The colour of the horizon varies, recalling a sunset even when the sun is at its highest point. The bright colours are complementary, with great visual impact. The wall shifts vertically, changing the space. The lateral, mobile dimension of the light creates a certain degree of instability, thus decontextualising the place.”
Concorso MACRO 2%
25 March 2011 - 31 December 2012
Roma Capitale, Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali e Centro Storico – Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali and MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma are proud to present the winners of the MACRO 2% competition: “Rope” by Arthur Duff and “Orizzonte Galleggiante” by Nathalie Junod Ponsard.
Exploiting the potential of light – the Competition’s theme – Arthur Duff (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1973) and Nathalie Junod Ponsard (Compiegne, France, 1961) offer the Museum and its visitors two public art installations. With a new approach to space, they transform transit areas into a meeting ground for the public and contemporary art to come together.
Rope, the work by Arthur Duff, consists of a red neon installation located in the fire-protection premises of the car park in addition to a laser projection onto the base of the glazed lifts. This can only be seen when the lifts are moving. The project links up the various levels of the Museum by joining the car park, the foyer, the first floor, and the large terrace in a continuous play of neon, laser, and movement. It will thus “connect and interlink the extremely discordant architectural forces, making them interact together.”
The neon words are a quotation from the first page of the script of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope: “The action of the story is continuous; there are no time lapses of any kind”, a message that foreshadows the visitors’ experience once they enter the glazed lifts, which is one of perceptive continuity and dialectic between observer and observed. Once inside the lifts, visitors will unconsciously become an active part of the work, observing the space from a unique position, but at the same time being observed themselves by those who are already in the Museum. Those outside will read another script projected onto the bottom of the lift: “Cat and rat cat and rat only who is the cat and who is the rat”, another quotation from Hitchcock’s film. This means that, when they enter the Museum and go through the premises, following this narrative sequence and the fixed neon lights, visitors will experience the action of a continuous, uninterrupted story, with the laser making them both subject and object in a sort of weird, unpredictable cat and rat chase.
Orizzonte Galleggiante (Floating Horizon), the work by Nathalie Junod Ponsard, is a LED installation in the stairwell that links the exterior of the new MACRO directly to the large terrace. The artist has created a luminous horizon of coloured LEDs which symbolically accompany visitors through the building, transforming this unusual space into a journey of intense, changing colours, counteracting the daring cuts and thrust of the architecture with a form of horizontality that is artificial and yet also alive and dynamic. The Museum staircase is thus opened up into a sweeping landscape in which the light constantly changes, creating dynamic atmospheres of unpredictable harmonies.
Ponsard’s horizon colours the great white walls of the staircase in ever-varying ways, with tones ranging from red to cyan, orange to indigo blue, and yellow to dark blue. The variable, floating light created by the installation gains even greater intensity when the sun goes down, enveloping the space and imaginarily taking the visitors who go through Odile Decq’s building towards an “other” place.
The artist describes the research she carried out for Orizzonte galleggiante, saying: “The horizon rises or falls – it’s a sort of level that appears in the space of the stairs. The museum has variable light conditions, making visitors lose their bearings in terms of height as they go up and down the stairs. The horizon shifts, as though MACRO were taking visitors to another place, in a vertical movement bathed in light that envelops the public. They will no longer know if they are going up or down, because the fields of light sway, floating unpredictably. The stairwell is constantly being reinvented and it offers no sense of direction, but on the contrary introduces a new dimension to the place... The colour of the horizon varies, recalling a sunset even when the sun is at its highest point. The bright colours are complementary, with great visual impact. The wall shifts vertically, changing the space. The lateral, mobile dimension of the light creates a certain degree of instability, thus decontextualising the place.”