Pulse

Pulse.

2020

Plastic, wood, turbine, neon light

Palazzo Ducale, torre Grimaldina.
Genova, Italy.

This project consists of a black, dome-shaped plastic membrane representing the universe. This membrane retains its shape thanks to the vacuum created by a turbine, which generates a vacuum between the dome and the walls of the room. A timer switches the turbine on and off every few minutes, causing the dome to ‘breathe’. When it is switched off, the sky slowly collapses onto the visitors. With ‘Pulse’, I believe I have succeeded in making that space lose its stability, so that its boundaries are no longer rigid and reliable, allowing one to move about safely. It is these boundaries that define the space, and in this case the universe depicted causes anyone who enters to lose all sense of spatial reference; the viewer loses the ability to know where it begins and where it ends; in fact, it seems much larger than it actually is; if we add to this the fact that the membrane enclosing it ‘breathes’, it shifts from its dome-like fullness to slowly collapsing onto the spectators inside. That which seems immovable, eternal—that which in some way sustains us loses its integrity and, with it, all certainty.