Platform, 2017

I believe that every opportunity, no matter how small and seemingly irrelevant, is always a chance to experiment and raise the bar, even if only by a few millimeters. And so it is with ‘‘Soul of City’’ an interesting event that occurs almost in the shadow of the world’s most important marble stone trade show and yet which has gradually become a highly valuable albeit tiny arena where a number of talented creative artists and brave businesses have had the courage and strength to perform and play together. The underlying objective was not just to produce ‘unique’ objects, but more specifically to arrange fragments of a new metropolitan body into a kind of a paradoxical urban system in which visitors could stop and live, even if only a few moments. A kind of landscape of objects designed to be experienced and lived, not just contemplated. This was the starting point for seven sculptures from seven countries all over the world whose original commission was later refined in collaboration with the companies involved. And the focus changed each time as it followed different directions. The piece by the British Sam Jacob together with Zanella Marmi worked on the paradoxical relationship between geometry and the irony of forms as did the ‘‘Ghosts of future buildings’’ by the Spanish AMIDcero together with Helios. The stately and imposing sequence of four walls designed by the Turk Alper Derinbogaz with Garfagnana Innovazione contrasted instead with the powerful primordial matter imagined by the Mexican Eduardo Castillo for Elite Stone.