Pirri with Professor Shara Wasserman
Alfredo Pirri at Cornell
On the 26th of September Alfredo Pirri came to give a lecture at Cornell in Rome. Pirri is an artist who is concerned with the representation of space and the vocabulary of architecture. This has resulted in works that address environmental issues in relationship to the urban space where nature and architecture interact in large public works and installations. Pirri makes use of materials such as wood, paper, watercolor, florescent paint, bamboo and glass to both represent works inside a space and to work and intervene in the space. He has participated in both international and national exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, PS1, etc. Dove sbatte la luce – Mostre e Opere (Where Light Hits – Exhibitions and Works), a book devoted to his work was recently published by Skira Ed. Milan.
A slide of Pirri’s Installation
A Slide of Pirri’s Installation – Path Between Shadows
Pirri’s lecture was spoken in Italian with Professor Shara Wasserman, who teaches the Contemporary Rome Seminar, translating. During the lecture Pirri displayed a wide variety of his work from the mid 1980s to the present, both built and unbuilt. Pirri said that in his work the body of the spectator was important in relation to the scale of a space. One got the sense that with his interventions Pirri was trying to make the architecture more viable to the viewer by bringing it both visually and tactically forward through his interventions. This was especially noticeable in his project “Path of Shadows” – a path with elevated platforms between bamboo trees in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome. In this particular project Pirri speaks to the environmental context of his work as well; he had found out from a botanist that the bamboo trees planted in the garden were sick from being given too much water and hence decided to make the path a plot of their gradual disease and eventual healing. In other works, by displacing architectural elements in a facade Pirri created works that stand out of their relationship to architecture to the the closer relationship with people themselves.
Pirri Speaking wih Jorge Puentes ’12