DEAD WOOD MEETS LIVING WOOD is an Applied Land Art project by Tamás Jovanovics

The project consists of amplifying the sitting area of the music/theatre/performance stage that can be found in the middle of one of the forests of Stanzia Castellani.

The seats are long and massive planks/benches arranged rhythmically on the ground of the clearing. The artist will add further planks that will exceed the territory of the clearing and placed gradually higher and higher on the trees, following the rhythm of the benches on the ground . At a certain stage the planks will be directed back towards the sitting area in a wave-like shape that will also be reminiscent as well of an organic roof  as of a see wave.

As a result the current sitting area will become a part of a semi-sculptural, semi-architectural installation that links the dead wood (the timber/planks/benches) with the living wood (the trees) that surrounds them. As a positive side-effect the installation shall also help the acoustic properties of the performance stage.

Tamas Jovanovics‘s main occupation is painting. In his painterly work he predominantly employs the most basic two-dimensional shape, the straight line in different ways. He is also author of numerous three-dimensional installations and of a large-scale Public Art work on three façades of a High School Campus in Hungary. So far his artistic interventions have always been developed in urban contexts, this one around the Stanzia Castellani will be his first in a country-side context.

Since the theme of the festival is Applied Land Art, the artist deliberately chose not to work exclusively with the elements of the natural surrounding (as a typical Land-Art work would do). It is the added term of “Applied” that made the artist think of linking the dead wood with the living wood, the artificial (human-made) sitting area with the surrounding (natural) forest.