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Vitruvius in Quarantine

Milan, Italy
Installation
2015

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Vitruvius in Quarantine

Milan, Italy
13 April 2015 - 20 May 2015

The installation consists of a succession of circular rings cut in stone shaping a ten-meter long tunnel. The visitor can access the core laterally from one end of the tube. At one end, is a stone reproduction of a performer’s body set in the position of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. The marble statue of the common Man desperately seeking to fit the canonical proportions of Vitruvius is idiomatic of the conventional use of stone in artistic practices. On the other end of the tunnel, is a video live-feed projection of that same performer captured on a bed in a studio in Karantina, Beirut, Lebanon. The actor, is framed within a perimeter mirroring the square binding the Vitruvian Man. The Man sleeps, moves, rests in common positions, appears and disappears out of the framed stage as he reenacts a generic routine. This performance of the ordinary life is monitored in real time and actual scale throughout the length of the exhibition. The circumference of the tunnel is an extrusion of the circle confining the Vitruvian Man built to scale. Moving into the cylindrical volume, the visitor is forced to seek balance by reaching out to the periphery of the confining space. Spontaneously and awkwardly mimicking the spread position of the Vitruvian Man, the visitor enacts a transitional phase between the solidity and morphological perfection of the classical figure carved in stone and the volatile nature of the digital image celebrating the spectacle of the banal. From Stone, the most grounded form of matter, to the utter ubiquity of the immaterial. Two eras are put in confrontation.