Caroline Baglioni - Il lampadario

On 14th August 2018 the Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed. I was a few kilometres away at the time and a few hours earlier I’d driven across the bridge. When I heard the news I was at lunch, I hadn’t wanted to go, in a small chalet over an angry sea. I was looking at those shocking, grey images on my mobile phone… Shards of car and concrete, in the early hours, and then in the days which followed, the stories of those who had made it, those no longer with us, those who had braked at the last minute, those who had stopped at the service station for coffee and a pee, miraculously escaping the collapse.
Il Lampadario (The Chandelier) is born from all this. A mysterious dimension in which beings and things can easily move around space and time, the bridge which links past and future to the present, before the eyes of those involved. The chandelier is a metaphor for an existential and physical state: head downwards the world is upside-down and takes a new form and new unthought of paths. With blood to your head you can even deceive, invent your life, pause time, stop at that moment at which it all could still not have happened. But how much time can an illusion last?

Caroline Baglioni