Francesco Merlini
Cahier nr. 10 - Cloth
Artphilein Editions, Lugano — 2024
In 2021 for a few weeks, the mountains near the Tonale pass in Italy, and the Champs-Élysées in Paris have been bonded by something that has not been seen before; Huge monuments covered with hundreds of meters of immaculate sheets interrupt the surrounding grayness, sparkling under the sun's rays and reacting to every gust of wind like possessed sails.
In France the packed monument was nothing other than the famous Arc de Triomphe, transformed by a group of volunteers into a posthumous work of art by the famous artist Christo who made a life mission to pack giant artifacts and pieces of landscape. On the border between Lombardy and Trentino-Alto Adige with an operation of much more impressive dimensions, an attempt is being made to save a giant that has been dying for some decades now, under the lashes of the increasingly violent solar rays because of global warming: the Presena Glacier.
