L’enigma di una giornata

The work L’enigma di una giornata (The enigma of one day) is an environmental intervention within the museum of Uri, in Altdorf, in 2016.

On the square in front of the Zurich main station stands the statue of Alfred Escher, who had been made eight years after his death by the sculptor Richard Kissling. In one of the storage buildings of the city I found the upper part of the sculpture’s model; It is said that the rest of the figure had been thrown into the lake of Zurich. In the storage room, the bust, which stood on a concrete structure, touched the ceiling as if it was helding the whole room.

I redesigned this situation in the exhibition space in Altdorf by tracing the dialogue between the bust and the ceiling.

The amputated body reinforced the partly tragic destiny and identity of Alfred Escher, whose personal history overlaps in an emblematic way with the history of modern and liberal Switzerland.