Piccole creature dell’Isolotto Little Creatures of the Isolotto
Gianluca Malgeri
An urban art project for the Giardino delle Erbacce
As part of Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The World Saved by Kids), promoted by the Compagnia Virgilio Sieni, sculptor Gianluca Malgeri was invited to lead a workshop with children on the theme of the bestiary, the research he had placed at the heart of his most recent solo exhibition.
In the children’s hands, lightweight, pliable aluminum wire bent until it became animal. Fantastic creatures came into being, suspended between the world we know and the one we imagine. But they did not stay on the worktable. Enlarged into a large-scale sculpture, Piccole creature dell’Isolotto, they stepped out into public space, where they enter into dialogue with Malgeri’s work already present in the garden and have found a home in the Giardino delle Erbacce. Now they inhabit a landscape made of plants and passersby.
The Giardino delle Erbacce is a place that holds a memory. It is dedicated in part to seeds, and it recalls what the soil was like before the new neighborhood, when plant life came before the city. Today this green space is a threshold: it joins the historic Isolotto, born in the 1960s also within the political and social climate fostered by Giorgio La Pira, with the streets and newer developments that followed.
In a place like this, the wire creatures invite us to slow down and look again at the landscape and the way it changes. They were born from the meeting of the children’s imagination, the artist’s gesture, and a light material that lets itself be shaped, and they seem to come from a possible world, where nature and imagination can still generate unexpected forms of coexistence.
For the Giornata del Contemporaneo (Contemporary Art Day), the project presents itself through a completed work, open to visit at any time. It is urban art that does not ask you to cross the threshold of a museum or exhibition hall: it lives outdoors, beside the neighborhood and those who live in it. And it shows how an artistic process can be truly shared, because the children’s work does not remain closed within the workshop but becomes a concrete presence, meant to last. Enlarged and returned to everyone, their creatures become part of a collective landscape. They are an invitation to imagine new worlds and to recognize, even in the most ordinary places of the city, the open space of contemporary art.
