Apparato Festivo: Sorgente
Installed in Via Ettore Rolli in Rome for Festival d'Architettura di Roma 2024 (FAR) from the 28th of September to the 6th of October, "Apparato Festivo: Sorgente" by ROBOCOOP is a site-specific installation that blends history, art, and architecture, offering a reflection on scenography as an intervention tool for city design. The work connects with the Roman tradition of ephemeral architecture, a practice that has profoundly transformed the symbolic occupation of urban space.
The title, ‘Apparato Festivo: Sorgente’, is inspired by the apparati festivi designed by Bernini and Schor at Piazza di Spagna to celebrate the birth of the Dauphin of France, an event which involved recreating nature within the urban space by building a giant artificial mountain. These baroque ephemeral scenic structures are imbued with symbolic and narrative values, celebrating key moments in the city's history.
The installation on Via Ettore Rolli emerges from a reading of the urban context and the positioning of the ephemeral portal on the southern edge of the small square. This space, surrounded by buildings from different periods of the 20th century, contains both a modern fountain built around 2000 (long inactive) and the ruins of an ancient chapel dedicated to the Vergine del Riposo. ROBOCOOP’s ephemeral apparatus serves as a new focal point for the square, bringing a virtual construction to this urban fragment: an idea of a mostra, a large fountain from which water gushes forth, in dialogue with both the ruined chapel and the modern buildings nearby.
This illusory scenographic fountain celebrates the meeting between nature and the built environment, a block of rock set in the city that engages both classical and modern architectural elements. The rocky surface gradually transforms into an architectural façade, evoking human intervention that shapes raw material: an image capturing the metamorphosis of the volume. It’s a theatrical spectacle where the viewer’s gaze follows the progression of transformation. The façade’s composition references Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculptural and architectural works, such as Apollo and Daphne at Galleria Borghese, the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, and the façade of Palazzo Montecitorio. The final artwork also includes anthropomorphic references from modern and contemporary architecture, such as Aldo Andreani’s Casa Sola Busca in Milan, and Luigi Moretti’s Il Girasole in Rome.
Through these works, Bernini sought to guide the viewer’s perception, directing their eyes along a process of phytomorphosis, a kinetic vision that incorporated the dimensions of space and time. Ettore Rolli thus becomes the stage for an urban scenography, with the installation taking the form of an artificial mountain, a monumental element acting as a visual and conceptual backdrop. This scenographic mountain integrates into the urban environment like a theatrical set, enhancing the idea of a visual narrative unfolding before the viewer.
The theme of metamorphosis permeates the entire work: the rock transforms into architecture, and the entire urban space undergoes a temporary transformation. The installation challenges the viewer to rethink their perception, inviting them to move around it, discovering new meanings and forms from different vantage points—a theatrical object in a theatricalized city.
‘Apparato Festivo: Sorgente’ by ROBOCOOP presents itself as an ephemeral fountain, constructed with lightweight materials such as PVC-printed fabrics that simulate the solidity of stone and the fluidity of water. These prints, illusionistically representing rocky textures, become materials of contemporary fictitious architecture, much like how baroque stuccoes mimicked natural elements. The work creates an optical illusion that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, encouraging the public to reflect on the relationship between architecture and art. Though temporary, the installation leaves a lasting impression on the perception of the space, transforming the small square into a place of wonder, where art becomes a tool to redefine the relationship between nature and the city, between the ephemeral and the permanent.
