Alessandro Agudio

Located on the third floor, Alessandro’s family apartment has two large balconies, accessed through large French windows. Through the balconies and the French windows, the domesAc landscape and the surrounding one become conAguous. The hay bales that populate the fields around the Residence Acquario also parAcipate in the tableaux vivants. In the eyes of Alessandro’s family, those bales gradually appear as platonic solids in a metaphysical painAng; they lose the pungent odor as well as the memory of the harvest as a pagan ritual; for Alessandro, they lose the shadows—shadows that had been the places of his first refuges, his first kisses, his first cigareZes. In the films of Italian neorealist cinema, the countryside on the edge of the city is always the scenario where the “residue” is released, or the surplus of life that the modernist form of the recently built city cannot contain.

- Michele D’Aurizio, extract of the text accompanying the exhibiAon Residence Acquario -