URBAN
The Urban series emerges from a visual and conceptual need that runs throughout Elena Armellini’s practice: a sharp confrontation with the unexpected, with space, and with matter. In these works, the artist addresses urbanization as a metaphor for contemporary instability, constructing structures that seem to rest on uncertain foundations, suspended between balance and collapse. These are installations that do not mimic the city, but evoke its unstable, fragmented soul.
The works unfold in platforms that communicate across a dilated, almost rarefied space, like a mental architecture taking shape through matter. Their language is made of precarious balances and broken lines, creating silent tensions—as if each element could collapse at any moment. The resulting atmosphere is that of a post-industrial landscape, an abandoned amusement park where the euphoria of construction has dissolved into the anticipation of disaster.
Matter—concrete, iron rods, wood—becomes the bearer of this tension. Nothing is hidden or polished: every surface bears the traces of process, of constructive urgency, of time pressing upon the material. These raw and brutal elements, handled through essential gestures, become witnesses to compressed collective memory, to a mental city where the urban element is dismantled, stripped to the bone, turned into symbol.
Urban is, then, a cartography of uncertainty. A representation of urban space not as a habitable scene, but as a field where the structures of our time—economic, emotional, social—tremble, fracture, and reshape themselves. The works raise a troubling and urgent question: what truly holds the form of our present together?
CARTOGRAPHY OF THE POSSIBLE
Kublai Khan doesn’t necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities he visited during his expeditions, but the Tartar emperor continues to listen to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows to any of his messengers or explorers. In the lives of emperors, there’s a moment that follows the pride in the infinite expanse of the territories we’ve conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing that we’ll soon abandon all thought of knowing and understanding them. There’s a sense of emptiness that pervades us in the evening, with the smell of elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes cooling in the bronze…
