Flavio Favelli conceives this project, together with the architect Flavio Gardini and the engineer Matteo Grilli, for a competition curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi.
The artist envisiones the creation of an outline of the old nuclear power plant in Caorso, opened in the Seventies and closed only eight years after. The power plant was dismantled in 2009 by the company Sogin, Società Gestione Impianti Nucleari (Nuclear Power Plants Management Company), which also promoted the competition. Starting from the premises of the designation letter, Favelli conceives a complex full-sized work which represents the shape of the former power plant as a memorial, a sculpture dedicated to the history of a placereflecting a much debatedissue of the last forty years such as the one of nuclear energy. The artwork consist of the full scale creation of the former power plant's outline - width 24.98 cm and height 9,98 cm - countoured by yellow neon. The work could remind of a triumphal arch, even if it doesn't celebrate political or military achievements, but instead it becomes a simulacrum of the power plant itself, a memory-sign of the building's exact structure, employed   to try to salvage the remembrance of the landscape. Its urban dimension makes the viewer enter a state of temporal bewilderment, almost a déjà vu, an alteration of memory through the construction of an ephemeral architecture. The project was canceled due to a change in the company's management.
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The project was created for an international competition promoted in 2009 by SEA, the company which manages Milan airport system. As stated in the announcement, the competition concerns the creation of “a new architectural project for the realization of an artwork that is going to change the appearance of the Malpensa airport. Specifically, the commission envisions a highly aesthetic space that is going to virtually represent the access door to the city of Milan. The purpose of this work of art, besides striking the passenger's imagination, is to become a location for cultural events and exhibitions”. Flavio Favelli presents Crystal Garden, a full-scale artwork which reproduces many features of the collective imaginary of Milan, while reminding at the same time Paxton's Crystal Palace. The reference to the architecture of London stems both from the project's title and from the materials that were to be used, such as the iron of old-aged gates and the glass thermoshell of the internal side. As declared by the artist itself, his architectural model is the aviary, which actually becomes a cage built with high-tech materials, which enables many and various activities. The complexity of the documents donated to MoRE portrays a careful planning and a thorough working method, showing also the relationship between the artists and the commissioner. Favelli's project presents many characteristic features of his body of work, which is able to succesfully combine the present with the past; here, the artist employs purposefully a futuristic approach through the usage of high-tech materials that opposes the recourse to found materials as well as to practices and modalities of appropriation. The project was not admitted to the second phase of the competition.
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