Holcim Italia

Nadia Vallino investigated the contrast between contemporary urban stratification and the childhood ideal of the city. Identities today are shaped by a vertical individualism, the same tension that animates his suspended castles. Made with Holcim's low-carbon ECOPlanet cement and dismantled scaffolding, these small villages evoke desire and precariousness, transforming scraps into emotional architectures. The work is born from the universal gesture of building a sandcastle: fragile, ephemeral, a symbol of a personal refuge. The artist imagines those castles that do not dissolve, but remain solidified in cement, allegories of a game that becomes structure.

The reclaimed post boxes from Pastificio Cerere, transformed into small windows, small glimpses, guard traces of the building's former inhabitants. Between play and barrier, refuge and prison, the installation reflects on the possibility of building a space amidst the ruins of the city and capitalism. The intuition comes from the surnames written on the doors of the disused post boxes, from two in particular, Romeo and Bellezza (Beauty). Not Juliet, but Beauty. Who is, or what is, Beauty? From there stems the idea of the tower, of the guardian and the prison, of a childlike ideology of architecture, and of something that is intermediate between the fairy-tale and the destroyed, the unhealthy, the broken. Somehow like our cities are.