CRITICAL CARPET: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
With this project I would like to explore the 6000 acres of re-regulated forest around Skien. My tools will be statistics on the land and the forest that lays there, on its past as a paper millregion, on its present as a biomass mine and its future as a data storage centre. In all three incarnations of the forest one element is common: information. Paper to store information, electricity produced through the biomass serves the purpose of carrying around information, and the future data centre is the contemporary stronghold of information holders.
During the previous years my practice has revolved around human modified landscapes, chaos theory and the way humans constantly negotiate the space they inhabit. Walking has a central role on how I relate my body to the landscape and recently I took up making carpets as a way to transmit the subjective ephemeral observations captured during my walks. The idea in this project is to map the 6000 acres, through stories, archives, walks, statistics, future promises and development plans. The results will be presented in three carpets: Past,Present and Future.
A human modified landscape is transferred to three different carpets which acts as a sort of time travel machine, bringing materiality, maps, stories and statistics into a form which will allow visitors to have a glimpse into the three different periods by walking and sitting on the carpets.
Alessandro Marchi is an Italian artist based in Oslo, Norway. Marchi’s artist practice revolves around human modified landscape, identity, inequality, chaos and public space, especially on how humans constantly negotiate and modify the space they live in. He works experimentally and site specific to create installations, events, artist books, walks, sculptures, carpets, paintings, maps, texts and audio pieces. Marchi holds an MFA at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2020)and an MSC in Mechanical Engineering at the Universitá degli Studi di Bologna (2002). His works have been shown internationally in exhibitions and museums in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Croatia, Norway, Netherlands and the UK.
