Marble tile mosaic, Cm 340x800, Castel Sant'Elmo - Novecento Museum Naples.
Land Code is a large-scale marble mosaic created in 2024 by Bianco-Valente for Castel Sant'Elmo in Naples. The artwork was acquired by the Novecento Museum in Naples through the PAC (Contemporary Art Plan) of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity.
Land Code, 2024, Marble tile mosaic, Cm 340x800, Castel Sant'Elmo - Novecento Museum Naples
From a text by Brunella Velardi:
Observing the large mosaic surface of Land Code, one has the impression that two imposing temporal waves—antiquity and present time—have met and shattered, crystallizing in the myriad of stone tiles that compose a vision that is simultaneously familiar and anomalous. To attempt to decipher it, as in many ways the title itself invites us to do, it is necessary first to pause on the elements that compose it.
The concept of code recurs in some works by Bianco-Valente, as does the related concept of writing. It is the principle of a narrative that begins with the artist's voice and is enriched along the way by other voices, giving rise to collective-performative and installation projects in which human, relational, natural, and technological components interweave in outcomes always at the boundary between definitions and adjacent categories.
Space, within this narrative, is characterized as the place where things happen and become fixed: it becomes landscape, context (land, precisely).
Ultimately, there persists an idea of 'system' that is undeniably at the base of the mosaic enterprise but also refers to an imagination that is profoundly contemporary, permeated by the verbal and visual language of the digital.
Finally, the materiality of stone tiles stands in contrast to the immateriality of the virtual element commonly associated with QR codes, of which only a kind of moving imprint remains here, a trail.
Brunella Velardi
Land Code, 2024, Marble tile mosaic, Cm 340x800, Castel Sant'Elmo - Novecento Museum Naples
Land Code, 2024, Marble tile mosaic, Cm 340x800, Castel Sant'Elmo - Novecento Museum Naples
Land Code, 2024, Marble tile mosaic, Cm 340x800, Castel Sant'Elmo - Novecento Museum Naples
Land Code, 2024, Marble tile mosaic, Cm 340x800, Castel Sant'Elmo - Novecento Museum Naples
Artwork creation at Fonderia Nolana Del Giudice Foundry
Contributors to the mosaic production:
Nunzia Ascolese, Giuseppe Balletta, Angela Caccavale, Alessia Cristofaro, Miriam De Vita, Gabriele Di Girolamo, Alessandro Gaudino, Yuliya Kryshchuk, Francesco Liberti, Stefania Puglisi, Irene Macalli, Diana Magri, Carlo Menale, Mariano Pesce, Demetriou Josef Selini, Valentina Spinelli, Monica Squarciafico, Amelie Staudhammer, Angela Stoccuto, Ladifatou Traore.
Coordinators: Antonio Flumeri, Carmine Carlo Maffei, Antonio Del Giudice.
Short film by Pasquale Napolitano documenting the Land Code mosaic production phases
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