Columns - Pebbles
by Francesca Balena Arista
by Francesca Balena Arista
What has always fascinated me most about Gianni Pettena’s work is his American experience—especially the Salt Lake City trilogy. Perhaps it’s because I first encountered him as a student, in the classrooms of the architecture faculty in Florence. When he spoke about his time in Utah, the contrast between the Renaissance city and the images emerging from his Carousel projector felt particularly stark. Salt Lake City meant the salt lake, the desert, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, wooden houses, and tumbleweeds—those typical “moments of tension from John Ford films,” as he used to say. I’ve always loved writing and originally wanted to study journalism, but my father convinced me to enroll in architecture school. So I was especially drawn to lecturers who had a storyteller’s gift, while I struggled terribly with exams in math, statics, physics, and anything similar. Pettena taught Contemporary Architectural History, alternating accounts from his professional life with episodes from his personal life. For me, he was a kind of salvation. He, along with a few other outsiders in the faculty—like Remo Buti, who taught Interior Design—sowed the seeds of critical thinking in the wake of the radical architecture movement, of which they had been key figures since the mid-1960s in that very same city of Florence.
Pettena, in particular, also taught us a certain kind of disobedience. He once told us that when he was a student, it was quite easy to fake a train ticket in order to travel around Italy and enrich one's cultural knowledge—even without much money. In 1972—the year I was born!—Pettena carried out, together with his students at the University of Utah, the three interventions that make up the Salt Lake City Trilogy. In the first, titled Clay House, a typical wooden middle-class home (inhabited!) is “naturalized” by applying a layer of clay by hand over its entire exterior surface—roof, entrance, and even the windowpanes. Insects crawl into the cracks of the clay, which eventually dries and begins to fall off, triggering a process whose final appearance cannot be predicted. The second work, Tumbleweeds Catcher, features a tall metal structure placed on a vacant lot in the center of the city. A “for sale” sign emphasizes the temporary nature of the setting. The structure traps desert tumbleweeds, suggesting a kind of revenge of nature over urbanized space. The third intervention is Red Line. Pettena and his students travel along the road that marks the municipal boundary of Salt Lake City, seated on the edge of a pickup truck. Using a spray gun and a compressor, they draw a continuous red line down the middle of the road—about 45 kilometers long—materializing the border itself. Gianni Pettena’s entire body of work is marked by a strong conceptual focus. It exists at the edge—difficult to categorize—just as these three interventions lie at the boundary between performance and land art.
Also known as The Anarchitect, the title of his first book, Gianni Pettena is a subversive figure. Meeting him during my university years was a pivotal moment for me—it shaped the direction of both my professional path and my life, starting with my first collaboration on his exhibition Radicals. Architecture and Design 1960–1975 for the 1996 Venice Biennale, directed by Hans Hollein. To fully grasp the spirit that has always driven him, here is a story told by his friend James Wines: “During his Phosphorescent Performance presented in Venice in 1977, Pettena painted his body in a dazzling fluorescent color, then plunged into the Grand Canal and swam across it, resembling those bioluminescent fish that inhabit the deepest crevices of the ocean.” With a single brilliant gesture, Wines notes, Pettena brings together the Venetian tradition of water-based spectacle with aesthetic risk, health risk, and marine exploration.