non-rifuggio

2025

installation

180x100x80cm

materials: water writings on 30g rice paper in charcoal-based ink, soy wax, ruined building frameworks, Blatten pebbles, cotton thread, dried alpine narcissus

non-rifuggio focuses on the idea of home as an unstable, provisional space—at times imagined more than built. It arises from a personal experience of housing precarity, spanning childhood—when I built shelters destined to collapse—and adult life, marked by constant displacement.

An ephemeral bivouac, assembled and dismantled in a single day without leaving traces, was installed near Blatten, where a landslide buried over 100 homes in May 2025. It resonates with a wounded landscape, returning in reduced scale the lines of the surrounding mountains, becoming an echo of the context that hosts it. Three rusted iron bones trace the project’s axes: personal, local, planetary. A fourth arxis bends inward, culminating in a dried narcissus that—like the mythical flower—consumes itself in its own reflection: an allusion to our struggle to look away from ourselves.

The skin of the installation trembles, tears, and folds while breathing with a mountain wind. Its surfaces recall cracked glaciers, structures on the verge of melting. Stones keep it grounded, like a tent fated to depart.

“The house is our corner of the world,” wrote Gaston Bachelard.

But in an age of climate emergencies, geological disasters, and forced migrations, even that corner appears precarious, transitory—constantly to be found, rebuilt, redefined.

non-rifuggio offers no shelter: it confronts us with the painful awareness that home—whether a tent, a building, or the planet itself—is no longer a guaranteed refuge.