Shade Between Rings of Air: Architecture as Sculpture: Carlo Scarpa/Gabriel Orozco

In 2003, Gabriel Orozco’s sculpture Shade Between Rings of Air was exhibited at the Venice Biennial. The work was a replica of La Pensilina (1952), a pergola by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Scarpa’s construction was part of his Sculpture Garden situated in the inner courtyard of the Italian Pavilion. Orozco’s Shade Between Rings of Air was fabricated in birchwood and placed in an interior space, in contrast to Scarpa’s exterior concrete structure. Orozco’s work was subsequently exhibited in diverse contexts, raising issues about site-specificity, cultural memory, and the dialectical relation between architecture and sculpture. This article explores, firstly, how Orozco’s work negotiates ideas related to architectural sculpture (and sculptural architecture), particularly the role of the replica and its spatiotemporal relation to the original. In particular, it argues that with Shade Between Rings of Air, Orozco probes the relationship between the original and the replica by introducing a deliberate anachronism, thus putting into question the idea of history as a linear process, while interrogating the mechanisms for the construction of cultural memory. Secondly, the article examines how Orozco internalizes with this work, and by using replication, aspects of modernist architecture in order to recast his own identity as a sculptor at the turn of the twenty-first century, at a time when the category of sculpture had become largely obsolete. Finally, I suggest that the best way to address these intricately intertwined issues is to discuss Orozco’s replica, conceived and initially presented as it was in the context
of Scarpa’s sculpture garden in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale,
by focusing on the history of the modernist pavilion and the sculpture garden where the intersection between architecture, sculpture, replication, anachronism and their concomitance with the construction of cultural memory is particularly fertile, even if little researched.