To architects the task of planning functional buildings, to artists that of creating functional symbols: Adrian Paci at the Venice Biennale Architettura 2014

 

Symbols are among the fundamentals of any artistic language. Of course it doesn’t mean that any work of art needs them – Concrete art and Arte povera, for instance, refused to be symbolic – but when looking at an image, or at a three dimensional piece of art, the beholder instinctively asks himself what it stands for. That is a matter of fact.

 

Is it the same with architecture? Probably it is, but not in the same way. Of course one can read any building as a symbol of something, even though creating a symbol generally is not the first priority for the architect, and definitely it cannot be his only one. The architect who is allowed to plan an architecture with the only purpose of symbolizing something becomes thus an artist.

 

That is what we thought at Venice Biennale Architettura when we bumped into the horizontal Corinthian column by artist Adrian Paci at the Pavillon of the Republic of Albania.

 

Even without the impressive, and in some ways hieratic video documenting the construction of the object and its travel on a factory-ship from China to Europe, the column essentially emerges as an effective and easy symbol representing the human labour. Let’s try to look at this column having in mind the image of Jesus Christ’s passion, and the strong meaning the column embodied in that case.

September 22, 2014