Cell #7

Cella # 7 is part of a series of sculptures, made of different materials (steel, copper, aluminum...) that reproduce the essential lines of a prison environment, whose measurements (2 x 3 m) correspond to the real dimensions of the detention cells of the death row of the infamous Huntsvillle prison, Texas. In this virtual representation of the cell the architectural lines are continuous and almost without interruption. This work shows the image of the set of the most essential objects of use which guarantee the minimum of survival in conditions of isolation. Nothing can therefore be moved or modified, nothing can suggests a possibility of choice for the individual who is inside it. The work represents a "masterpiece" of modernist functionalism, where there is an exact corrispondence between the environment that has been conceived and arranged, and the style, its philosophy. The paradox consists in the complicity that is established between the aesthetic mask of a judicial system, as an extreme form and language, excessive of any political power, and the history of taste and its conventions, including architectural one, which is perhaps, among all forms of art, that which flows into the real world with more persuasive possibilities; precisely as a language of power. In the particular case of this example # 7, the fifteen endecasyllables of the Infinite by Giacomo Leopardi cross the lines of the architectural structure, with the purpose of recalling the individual's spatio-temporal condition.