Rebecca Moccia has for some years been exploring the atmospheres and “temperatures” of places and investigating the spatial/temporal contexts in which human and non-human relations develop, with a special focus on how emotions and places influence one another. The site-specific project developed for Casa Zegna concentrates on atmospheric transformations and draws on the peculiarities of this space to reflect the connection between climate and environmental changes and the temperaments of those who experience them.
The title and sub-title of the exhibition ATMOSFERICA. Seasons and temperaments express a desire to investigate the ways in which human emotions are formed in relation to their surroundings and how the impact of unsustainable development, which alters their rhythms and balances, also affects the sphere of our perceptions and emotions.
The project was engendered by Rebecca Moccia’s numerous visits to the Casa Zegna archive and museum facility and Oasi Zegna. The latter is a 100 km2 area surrounding the eponymous wool mill and was created by Ermenegildo Zegna at the beginning of the last century as a unique model of social and environmental conscience.
The exhibition is in Casa Zegna’s former winter garden, a wholly glazed space where the light changes with the time of day and the season and where artificial temperature conditioning is deliberately minimal. Offering an almost total symbiosis with the surrounding mountain landscape, Casa Zegna is transformed by ATMOSFERICA into a living organism by deft use of fabric, the element on which the respectful collaboration between Fondazione Zegna and the environment is founded.
Rebecca Moccia’s work conceives two different environmental atmospheres in fabric, one linked to warmth and the other to cold, rendered both visually and tactilely. The artist weaves together materials with the opposite properties of dissipating or absorbing heat, of allowing or preventing the passage of light, of softening or sharpening the sound effects that travel through the ambience to dress Casa Zegna’s architecture. The temperature gradients are also accentuated by the use of cold colors for the summer and warm colors for winter.
Produced in collaboration with the textiles facility of Comunità di San Patrignano, the fabrics also model the ambience by way of sculptural forms that delimit contemplative spaces in which to stop a while. The artworks are flanked by hand-woven tapestries that symbolically represent the physical relationship between places, bodies and temperatures.
The exhibition ATMOSFERICA. Seasons and temperaments is part of a project that Fondazione Zegna is dedicating to relations between nature, art and science, which was launched in 2020 along with the Zegna Forest reforestation plan and the monitoring of Oasi Zegna’s state of health. The ecosystem it hosts is at the centre of a 10-year regeneration plan involving various artists (Laura Pugno, 2021; Emilio Vavarella, 2022; Roberto Coda Zabetta, 2023) in the interpretation of the philosophical, visual and emotional aspects that it evokes.
OPENING HOURS:
Open every Sunday 25 May – 17 November 2024
from 11 am to 5 pm
and also on Saturday 25 May and Saturday 1 June
Open every day in August
Tickets: full price 7 euros, reduced 5 euros
