Paradiso

Paradiso is an installation devised and planned as a harrowing, dystopian image of a sky set in this historic present, in which every ideal perspective appears to have collapsed. It is a monumental environmental work which unfolds in a space of 3,000 square meters, as a direct attack on the reality and times in which we live. The visitor is presented with a depleted paradise reduced to its skeletal remains, ravaged by time or by something that has slowly consumed it. The seven vaults of heaven have half-collapsed due to leaking water, patched up with insulating materials. The seven large rooms where the hierarchy of angels reside are empty, inhabited by tramps wrapped in their mylar blankets. As one walks through the exhibition, amid filthy latrines and puddles beside mounds of snow, one has the sinister sensation that everything we see is the result of an act of violence. A marble wall, on which all the names of the angels are engraved, is broken into fragments. In the last room, behind a large iron portal, an underground track evokes an indelible image in collective memory: the railway tracks that vanish into the night and lead to the concentration camps.