SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION

2023
Instituto Italiano de la Cultura
Santiago, Chile

We live besieged by noise, immersed in a vortex of fleeting images that pass before their time, in a society that prefers the exhibition of the self over the expression of the self.
And instead of noise, we seek silence.

It is precisely through silence that Deviazioni opens a timeless, unanchored landscape, drawing attention away from a convulsive present without withdrawing from reality itself, but rather attempting to grasp those hidden peculiarities that escape within the frantic rhythm of everyday life.

In this way, a space of deceleration takes shape, as David Scognamiglio intervenes in the natural and temporal processes of materials — compromising them, manipulating them, redefining their form. Matter is thus transformed into something bearing the mark of human presence.

First, the ground, with its undulations and cracks, resembles a sculptural artifact: a surface continually redefined by the passage of each visitor, tearing, splitting, and twisting beneath their weight. Then comes the void, flooded by the glow of a light that appears like a stable and motionless oracle, irresistibly drawing one toward itself. The effect produced by light interacting with darkness generates visions capable of altering the perception of all things, finally becoming the occasion for an almost meditative experience.

The title Deviazioni is not an explanation of the work, but rather an allusion to reality transformed by the human hand — an attempt to provoke a broader reflection on how human beings have created their habitat, how they confront and maneuver change, perhaps even questioning what trace they will leave behind.

The staging of the work presents itself as an alteration of reality — a deviated reality. Yet the spatiality it generates remains welcoming, inviting the presence of the human being to inhabit it in an almost spiritual way.

Each visitor will therefore experience something free, personal, and distinct from that of others, yet shared. Just as when wandering through a desert, each person will encounter their own vision and rediscover, within their own dazzlement, an intimate and individual moment.

Beginning from architecture, yet long engaged in the study of light, the artist David Scognamiglio, through Deviazioni, stimulates the unconscious of each individual to confront their own subjectivity — a transposition between inner vision and the gaze cast upon human activity — making the visitor aware that each of us is capable of shaping an authentic and deeply personal experience of the surrounding world.

— Ylenia Rose Testore, architect and independent curator.