BRUNO VELCIC: ROOM TO GET FOCUSED

This structure is nothing more than a simple round wall placed on a very special place. So, what is this wall and what makes this place special? If we could take away a place (any place) and put it somewhere else, we will surely notice how and why is it special. There are no “regular” or “ordinary” places. Also, a building makes environment significant, relevant, or at least noticeable. Therefore, I have chosen a position for the building which is slightly “by the road”, not in the middle of the meadow, or of the valley, or on the top of some well-seen hill – there is not much to see from the outside, it is a common form of a big barrel or a cistern, and it doesn’t represent anything at all, indeed I hope it doesn’t even represent itself, if such a thing is possible.

On one hand, with choosing quite (let’s say) insignificant place for (symbolically) insignificant object, I wanted to show how things are special by themselves, and people just need some obstacle to stop for the moment and see it, some barrier to perceive the continuing space.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to “tell” anything with my intervention, because it is quite superfluous to contaminate such an astonishing area with stories from the everyday issues of the World – people did already put some serious effort to get to that distant isolated place, so I guess it will be more than enough just to let them experience that particular piece of Mediterranean wilderness as it already is. This structure helps connecting with the place, because walls are defending, not imprisoning you.

When they talk about the pure nature, untouched by humans, people are always imagining this feeling of freedom when you run down the sweet little soft herbage barefoot. But when they actually get to the nature, they mostly feel kind of scared – they have this clear idea about leaving this place very soon through every moment of visiting it, so they can enjoy it through photos later.

That phenomenon is making that place different from Home. Wall helps in a way.

It defends you from several different types of influences that are not unpleasant, but are an obstruction to calm down, to stop searching, exploring. When you enter this structure, you are still on Stanzia Castellani land, just without the landscape scene and basic open space noise.

Inside there are these cca 15 square meters of soil and big round roof window, open to the sky or endless space. And of course there is also this white wall as the third element, and it looks just friendly. One can enter the structure through a door, as subtle as almost invisible, from the inside or the outside.  The walls block out the sight and the sound of the surrounding land, leaving the visitor alone with the soil and the sky, framed in a bright white wall. A full symbolic connection between the Underworld, World and the Heavens is completed by the drainage hole within the Walls leading into the rock base of the area, that was discovered shortly before constructing the object.