Matteo Mezzadri

The perception of places, the physical and mental crossing

of space, the poetics of travel as a search for contact and

blending with others are constant factors in Matteo Mezzadri’s

artistic research. His effort is never exhausted in a single

work or image. Rather, by drawing relationships between

the most varied means of expression, he creates visual paths

that convey the complexity and ambiguity of the contemporary

world.

THE H1=H2 PROJECT revolves around the well of the Guggenheim

high school and, ideally, the scarcity of the planet’s

resources and their unequal distribution. The project

is organized into two separate parts. The first consists of a

powerful, massive installation of bricks forming a ‘minimal

city’, the last in a long series of site-specific installations in

which simple perforated bricks are stacked to reproduce the

skylines of contemporary metropolises. A sort of fractal system

in which the most basic cell of any actual building, the

brick, appears as the building itself. A solid cube of bricks

stands at the centre of the ‘minimal city’, hiding and ‘defending’

the well from outside. While the city of bricks all around

represents the contemporary metropolis, and the West in a

broader sense, the well is instead a metaphor for its world’s

precious resources, threatened by what ‘lies outside’: underdeveloped

countries that are pressing to share in these

resources but remain excluded.

In contrast to the first part of the project, the second part

is an entirely immaterial work focusing on the relational dynamics

that coalesce around the idea of sharing and redistributing

resources. This part of the project deals with the

physical principle of communicating vessels, according to

which a liquid contained in two or more connected containers

reaches the same level, creating a single equipotential

surface. Unlike political decisions, this physical law is universal

and always valid for everyone at any time in history and

anywhere in the world. The physical principle of communicating

vessels reduces to a single equation that is beautiful

in its simplicity: H1 = H2 (height1 = height2, but in the

work, Human1 = Human2). The operational part of this second

phase of the project consists in connecting students in

two classes at artistic high schools, one class from the same

Guggenheim Institute hosting the pavilion, the other from

Cameroon. The students will have to exchange information

and collaborate in the design of a new well in northern Cameroon.

The two ‘twin’ wells, true communicating vessels like

the minds of the young people who will work on the project,

will communicate at a distance and the resources will actually

be redistributed.