Sculptures and installations

REFUGE/RIFUGIO

Elena Armellini Sculptures and installations

REFUGE

 

golden refuge 2

 

 

This series stems from a reflection on the meaning of “refuge.” Not all places called “refuge” truly are. In some, one is more exposed than protected. Language retains the name, but the gesture that once grounded it has been lost. This gap between word and thing becomes the starting point.

“Refuge” derives from the Latin refugium, from re- (return) and fugere (to flee). It does not simply indicate a place one goes to, but a movement that comes to a halt: the end of fleeing, the retraction of being.

In Ancient Greek, the corresponding word is kataphygé, from kata- (downward, deeply) and phygé (flight): a descent into flight, a motion that lets itself fall downward, toward something that protects.

In German, two words appear side by side: Zuflucht, a flight toward something, and Refugium, a more philosophical and intimate word — a place of retreat and contemplation. In Italian, we have retained only rifugio, while the Latin refugiumsurvives as a literary or spiritual trace.

The refuges I build in this series are small, ephemeral structures, made from humble, found, and salvaged materials. They are models, but not in the architectural sense. They are attempts at a gesture, traces of an act: that of withdrawing, of seeking protection, of looking for a place where the flight might finally come to rest.

They are not houses. They are not temples. They are attempts.

Each refuge is also a question: is there still, today, a space where it is truly possible to take refuge?

BEHIND THE DOOR

Elena Armellini News, Sculptures and installations

BEHIND THE DOOR

Mixed media on shaped panel
Variable dimensions

 

 

This work arises from a question that seems simple, but isn’t: what happens to the space we leave behind when we close the door to our home?

Behind the door, the moment it shuts, what was once a lived-in space begins to transform. It becomes a silent absence. Objects remain, but are no longer seen. Rooms persist, but as if they withdraw into themselves, distant from the gaze.

The work doesn’t aim to represent a domestic interior, but to evoke emptied space—the moment in which presence gives way to memory. It is the abandoned place that begins to speak, not through things, but through the atmosphere that gathers within it.
This is not nostalgia, but a reflection on suspended time, on emptiness as an active space, which holds traces and resonance.

Panofsky wrote that every representation of space is also a mental construction. In this sense, the shaped panels are not merely surfaces to paint on, but attempts to give form to an inner space—perceived, embodied, sedimented in memory.

Each painting is a threshold, a fragment that seeks to hold onto what usually escapes: the instant a place stops being inhabited, yet doesn’t cease to exist.
There, in the distance between the gaze and what has been left behind, another presence takes shape. Silent. Invisible. Persistent.

 

 

CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE POSSIBLE/ CARTOGRAFIE DEL POSSIBILE

Elena Armellini Sculptures and installations, Senza categoria

URBAN
Urban 2 Jarach Gallery Venezia Elena Armellini

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…