Promo - published on 09 February 2024
Source: press office Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche
The Espacio Escultórico in the Pedregal de San Ángel, Mexico City, is dedicated to the thirty-third edition of the International Carlo Scarpa Garden Prize, 2023-2024. The Prize, conceived and implemented by the Benetton Studi Ricerche Foundation and focused on a place dense with the values of nature, memory and invention, returns to explore for the second time, after its first edition in 1990 that saw the selection of Roberto Burle Marx’s Sítio Santo Antônio da Bica in Brazil, places belonging to the vast world of Latin America.
The Espacio Escultórico is a place consisting of a large collective artwork that emerges from the same lava surface on which new neighborhoods and, above all, an entire university city, that of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam), were born and developed in the last century, beginning in the late 1940s.
A toothed ring, composed of sixty-four concrete prisms resting on a circular base 120 meters in diameter, circumscribes a piece of “intact” lava soil, making manifest the expressive power of this landscape, but also its changing and fragile condition.
A work strongly desired by the University and inaugurated in 1979, the Espacio Escultórico expresses in an exemplary way the value and significance of a landscape-that of the Pedregal de San Ángel, so forged by a volcanic eruption-with which the city, the institutions and the university communities the cultural environment and Mexican society confront and dialogue on the level of its environmental and ecological value, its evocative power, but also the conflicts generated within the urban expansion of a megalopolis that encircles its perimeter and modifies its nature and meanings over time.
Resulting from the eruption of the monogenetic volcano Xitle, -which in geological terms is recent, having taken place, approximately, only one thousand five hundred or perhaps two thousand years ago-, the Pedregal (which in Italian we might call “pietraia”) appears to us as an expanse of lava rock scattered with vegetation and morphological variations, evolving over time and manifesting itself as a living landscape, rich in ecological value, and still dense with reminders of the pre-Hispanic history that preceded it, despite the enormous reduction in its original perimeter and extent.
The Espacio Escultórico represents an important chapter in this developing landscape and, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the sculptural fixity of its image, it establishes a meeting point between past and future, straddling the great affair of the construction of the University City and the evolution of an ecological consciousness of its campus, a “landscape of resistance” rather than a peaceful and reassuring setting for a community that is in some respects privileged.
The method and constructive process chosen for the Espacio Escultórico, that of convening six artists from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas – Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguérez, Mathias Goeritz, Hersúa, Sebastián and Federico Silva – to create a collective work, thus devoid of a mono-authorial character, is significant today, totally aimed at the interaction with the present landscape and its historical legacy, and which takes on a broader meaning – today we would say “non-anthropocentric” -, open to the ecological instances that would soon emerge, and which there, in the Pedregal, the very work of this group of artists helps to bring out. In fact, the season following the construction of the Espacio Escultórico would be marked by the defense of what remains of the Pedregal, the protest over its progressive destruction, and the realization by the scientific and student community of its value, with the official creation, in 1983, of the ReservaEcológica del Pedregal de San Ángel(repsa), desired by unam.
Of the value of the work much has been written and many are its interpretations. In the vision of the Carlo Scarpa Prize, the Espacio Escultórico is a place of personal meditation and at the same time of collective action: its history leads us to reflect on the relationship between artistic gesture and ecological consciousness; the choral dimension of its conception invites us to think about individual commitment in the field of landscape, to establish new coordinates and new design tasks.
The main public moments of the Carlo Scarpa Prize 2023-2024 will take place, in Treviso, in April 2024:
The Carlo Scarpa International Garden Prize
So named in honor of Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978), architect and inventor of gardens – is a research and curation project dedicated to a place, conceived and implemented, since 1990, by the Benetton Studi Ricerche Foundation. A project that each time takes off from insights and explorations addressed to different places and cultures.
Scientific Committee of the Foundation and coordination of the Prize
Luigi Latini, architect, Iuav University of Venice (chairman);
Giuseppe Barbera, agronomist, University of Palermo;
Hervé Brunon, garden historian, André Chastel Center, Paris, CNRS;
ThiloFolkerts, landscape architect, 100Landschaftsarchitektur, Berlin;
Anna Lambertini, architect and landscape architect, University of Florence;
Monique Mosser, art historian, Versailles School of Architecture, CNRS;
Joan Nogué, geographer, University of Girona;
Juan Manuel Palerm, architect, University of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria;
José Tito Rojo, botanist, University of Granada.
Carmen Añón, landscape architect, University of Madrid, honorary member since 2011;
Domenico Luciani, architect, creator and head of the Prize from 1990 to 2014, honorary member since 2015.
The activities of the Carlo Scarpa Prize are curated and coordinated by.
Patrizia Boschiero, head of the Foundation’s Editions, and
Luigi Latini, chairman of the Scientific Committee and director of the Foundation.
Cultural initiative under the patronage of:
UNISCAPE, Ministry of Culture, Veneto Region, City of Treviso.
