Inaugurated last September 12, 2020, Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi has officially opened his permanent public art on the seafront of Reggio Calabria, Italy called “Opera”. Erected in the park via Giunchi, the area together with the installation offers views across the strait of Messina to the island of Sicily as a place of contemplation.
Commissioned by the local Municipality and the Metropolitan City, the public art installation consists of a colonnade of 46 pillars of wire mesh peaking at eight meters at their highest point in a 2,500-square meter park. The opening weekend welcomed the guests to a series of free music, performance, and poetry events with a sound installation by Italian musician and composer Teho Teardo and Franco Arminio.
Fully accessible and traversable, the monument is open to locals and visitors as it became a new landmark for the region. According to Tresoldi, “Opera was created to emphasize the character of a place through a built element, thus suggesting an additional layer of understanding.” This latest installation of Edoardo Tresoldi immortalized for the southern Italian city generates an imaginary space that leads visitors into an ever-changing perceptive dimension.
Tresoldi plays with classical architecture through the transparency of the wire mesh, as this to discover new visual poetics in dialogue with the surroundings of the viewer. The pillars compose a frame of the court allowing for further interpretation of the park which is Western cultural heritage’s founding archetypes.
The Opera is the second installation of Tresoldi in Calabria after Il Collezionista di Venti in 2013.
