LUX CAVAT LAPIDEM
"At the beginning ot time Art was pray. Little is left of that infinite beauty. Now we are no longer able even to pray. We walk like blind men in the ruins". Claudio Parmiggiani
The earth and the sky. The shadow and the light. The life and death. The opposites conjunction and the discovery journey. A sacralizing act, an archetypical and ancestral sign. A cut into the rock, an engraving on earth, the violent gesture that generate sacrifice. Rock fragments, archeological remains of a fossil organism. A circle of colossal stones, sacred altars engraved on the Mather womb, blood, bones and stone totems:
“How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven”. Genesis 28:17
Incised on the flank of the rocky spur where Sovana lies, facing the Toscan valley and the mount Amiata toward north, colossal altars generate a squares-streets system, a dynamic space right into the heart of the earth. Toward south, kingdom of earthly gods, those majestic stones project themselves from the ground as ideal terraces created by the “removing art”. Toward north, kingdom of celestial gods, isolated boulders face a cliff through the necropolis valley, limiting the inner sacred space and framing every sacred thing on the outside. A narrow space between an here and an elsewhere, where the sky and the view become the point of contact between body and soul.
From East to West the journey, from the birth of life toward the sun sets, the path through the stones, in an ideal quest for truth travelling the mistery.
As stones just quarried to light from solid night, fragments from an unfathomable virtual building, carried out beyond time, by the time reduced from building to geography, forever animated by connections already moved from natural things’ order to architectural order.
A monumental starway cut into the rock leads, from light to shadow, toward the earth of the project. A street similar to the external one organise the distributive space between the different stones.
A large metallic band twists and turns trough the mute stones, dividing an above from a beneath, a ground from an invading sky.
Between stone and stone, articulated by the light changed in view, the blocks entries. Compact masses, matter of the endless time, they are incised by the light, water ideal transfiguration during her slow and relentless work.
Earth split, mould herself with the implacable work of the light which shapes the space.
Balance, form, order, geometry: light humanizes space and time. The opposition between the abstract nature of the rule and the endless variability of the natural element, shows the eternal fight between opposites. Inside this fight turned into exchange, light and space look for each other untill they blend themselves. The light become rule, she is the one that gives a soul to the space and is beneath her action where architecture exists.
