What Art Can You 3D Print With a Kilo of Plastic?
Do not hide. You are perfect here. Perfect in height, weight and skin color. Perfect for amount of hair and number of limbs. Perfect in uncertainties, sufferings and fears. Perfect in your fragility and in your being so humanly vulnerable. Do not be frightened.
By Fondazione Near Onlus
CICATRICI
Scars. Anna, 15, wants to talk about them at a social meeting. It's summer, the bikini reveals and makes people discuss: “There is someone who makes fun of me”. Yet we all have scars, some on the body, some in the heart, some in the spirit.
Two years later. Another meeting, in a different context. We are in the Library of the Department of Chemistry, at Politecnico di Milano. We talk about 3D printing and its usefulness.
“What would you print with a Kilogram of plastic?”.
With a Kilogram of plastic, you can print a useful object ...
but also a symbol.
First Cicatrici Workshop (2018)Fondazione Near Onlus
Only a few weeks go by, the Library tables this time are full of drawing materials. Large sheets that reproduce the Venus of Milo with her antique chignon and Michelangelo's David, famous instead for his back side.
We close our eyes, concentrate on the task: choose a scar that marks us and project it on the statues. We draw, color, cut and paste for an hour. Then in a circle we try to explain. Restitution is a gift of one's vulnerability to others. We rely on it.
An intimacy is created in the spontaneity of sharing. A group. There is no distinction between those who are sick and those who are healthy. Who is big, who is small.
Now we each have a drawing. And a technology.The +LAB is on the fourth floor. The hum of the printers is heard. One by one our voices try to specify those sketches. Telling serves to elaborate, visualize, modify.
We aim to give shape to something concrete, emotions do not disperse but cling to both Venus and David.Those who know how to draw and model in 3D listen with bright eyes and a participating heart, to get through with that one kilogram of plastic.
The Cicatrici Project
It happens to the +LAB researchers to be joined by new faces: someone is there to learn to model, someone touches up the Venus with copper-colored hair, some oscillate between careful revisions and activities that can only be defined as “mess around”.
As the thread in the printer adds one layer after another, in the same way new Venuses and new Davids crowd the laboratory.
On the first day of spring we are back in the same Library. It's been at least 6 months.
The work is done, this is a party. One by one he removes the veil from each statue and we understand, seeing them all together, that this is a collective work that deserves and has the responsibility to talk about the beauty of a scar.
If you felt that your scar was more gloomy or embarrassing or important, now you see that it places itself in a powerful wave of humanity. Suddenly we are proud of them, we find them so beautiful and human. We want to say it. We want to show them. There is an extra statue. The drawing has an author, but someone else made it.
It is a gift for those who have risen above the clouds ahead of time.
One question. How do you tell this story? We have a video, made with sensitivity and affection, which shakes and excites, our eyes sparkle every time. Together with us a doctor, many doctors, then managers, journalists, teachers begin to believe in us.
The President of an important exhibition space, a publishing house, a communication agency believes in it. Philosophers, writers and artists join it. Suddenly Scars exist. Beyond us.
The entire Team (2018)Fondazione Near Onlus
It is a work that lives for new eyes. Venuses and Davids talk to those they meet, they ask to recognize themselves in them, they give a new perspective on themselves, on others, on fragility and strength.
For us it is like having donated stardust.
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