Mondo Terracqueo is the title of a cultural, artistic and experiential installation set up by Geometry Global Italy and the Municipality of Portofino to inaugurate a new communication campaign aiming to highlight the value of Portofino as a microcosm of land and sea, a perfect model of beauty, a symbol of harmony between mankind and the environment, between culture and nature.
Born of the collaboration of artist Marco Nereo Rotelli with Acquario di Genova, Mondo Terracqueo is an original art set-up harbored at the heart of Portofino since December 13, intending to enhance and convey the sustainability messages that Portofino embodies as a place where mankind and nature are already coexisting in peace.
The globe, which is 250 cm high, sits in the middle of the port and can be reached from a floating boardwalk – a unique pathway that will take visitors right into the sea, to the discovery of valuable sustainability messages. Made from steel, the globe will be engraved in fire with words on the sea and the planet by the greatest poets of the world.
The heart of the project and the installation itself is light, the real stylistic mark of Marco Nereo Rotelli’s art. The globe was created in collaboration with Banci, an Italian company leading the luxury lighting industry, which has skillfully blended craftsmanship with technological innovation.
At night, the globe will light up from within, making the words even more visible, while a music inspired by the sounds of water – purposely composed by DJ and radio host Alessio Bertallot – will spread from within the globe and embrace vibrations, notes, and voices from different music cultures and styles, for a perfect alchemy between the past and the present.
The Brown castle will also be part of this project, turning into a bright lighthouse in light blue, the color of the infinite. In line with Rotelli’s stylistic code, the castle walls will be decorated with projections of the lines that great contemporary poets – Adonis, Giuseppe Conte, Yang Lian, and many others – dedicated to the sea.
This poetic message will come along with scientific information by Acquario di Genova and the namesake Foundation, which will actively contribute to the project via displays placed on the globe to provide information, data and graphs on the health of the sea.
Born in Venice in 1955, Marco Nereo Rotelli graduated in architecture in 1982. For years, he has been researching light and that poetic dimension that Swiss art historian and curator Harald Szeemann has defined as an expansion of the artistic context.
Over the years, Rotelli has built a connection between art and the various disciplines of science. Hence his involvement in the research carried out by philosophers, musicians, photographers and movie directors, but mostly his relationship with poetry, which has become in time a constant reference for his work.
Rotelli’s greatest installations include his tribute to Venice’s Teatro La Fenice, which had just burned down in a fire, unveiled at the Rome Quadriennale (1996); Bunker Poetico, set up at the 49th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2001); and the rehabilitation project for the San Secondo island in the Venice lagoon, introduced at the 51st edition of the Biennale (2005), which earned the artist a silver plate from the President of the Italian Republic.
Rotelli has also stood out on the international scene for creations like his permanent installation dedicated to the Beat Generation, commissioned by the New York Living Theatre; a work presented in 2008 at the International Art and Design Biennale of the Shandong University, China, which earned him an Academy Award; a piece titled The Golden Wood, set up along the Champs Élysées in Paris; and in 2009, a luminous installation on the façade of Santiago de Compostela’s cathedral for the Fiesta del Apóstol.
In the following years, Marco Nereo Rotelli created installations in Milan (Rotonda della Besana and Piazza del Duomo), Genoa (tribute to Edoardo Sanguinetti), Venice, Naples, Chicago, Yangzhou, Bir Zeit (Palestine) and Rome.
The artist’s works are featured in museums and important private collections all over the world.
