[2021-2022] Ugo Schiavi in the Langlet-Santy district (Lyon 8)

Keen to continue the relationship begun there in 2019, Veduta is teaming with the dynamics at work in Lyon’s 8th borough by contributing to discussions around its artistic, cultural and urbanism projects. After talks with local stakeholders, and in view of the borough’s initiatives around vegetation and urban farming since it was awarded the Quartier Fertile label, Veduta invited the artist Ugo Schiavi to hold an artistic residency in the Langlet-Santy district.

A sculptor by training, Schiavi is interested in the contrasts and the violence of encounters and in how an artwork is a fragment of a snapshot. Through the imprint-casting technique, he appropriates pieces of statues which he chooses in public space and, with a volunteer’s help, combines the immobile historical body with the living, dynamic contemporary body. The resulting sculpture thus shifts from the infinite and indefinite time of a monument that is designed to endure, to a capture of the present.

Since 2020, Ugo Schiavi has been exploring new avenues – for example, examining the properties of “undesirable” grasses or drawing inspiration from landscape thinkers such as Gilles Clément. In conjunction with Veduta and its Lyon 8 partners, Ugo Schiavi will thus embark during his residency on a new phase in his art practice: putting his interest in plants into plastic application, by immersively exploring the local ecosystem. He is stepping away, in a sense, from the permanence of a built heritage to consider the ephemeral nature of the living world and how it interweaves with the human beings who move daily through spaces where a spontaneous, invisible flora thrives discreetly. He enlists the district’s users to conceive hybrid artworks that connect a heritage made accessible to the greatest number with plant life that they are invited to appropriate and nurture.

Photo: View of the Uprising exhibition, The Pill Gallery, Istanbul