Monumento, Venice, Italy, 2022

Presented within the Procuratie Vecchie in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Monumento renews the language of the monumental column and the values to which society aspires in order to reflect its own epoch.

“Monumental architecture is a composition which neglects function in order to ritualize a thought by means of a three-dimensional work. The history of peoples is that of a hereditary flow of rhetorical figures which continuously recur in cycles; they redefine their own meanings and establish symbolisms which we have not only learnt to read but which, generation after generation, we have absorbed as a sort of latent language of the collective unconscious. When, therefore, a monument is stripped of its own symbolism, what remains is a virtuoso and melancholic lyric song, discrete and solemn, and yet in search of contact because it was born to be expressed, first as artifact and gesture and then as a concept and presence. With Monumento, I have used the rhetorical language of monumental columns as a reflection on our times and on the rhetoric underlying the values to which our society aspires; a society which confirms the need to redefine the concept of strength, to reconsider the role of frailty and which puts listening and dialogue at the centre of intercultural relations”. – Tresoldi

After an extensive 5-year restoration by David Chipperfield Architects Milan, promoted by Generali, the iconic building of the Procuratie Vecchie in St. Mark’s Square now opens to the city. A prestigious place that, for the first time in 500 years, reveals its spaces called to a new social purpose, witnessed by the opening of the new home of The Human Safety Net foundation.

Monumento is conceived in collaboration with Carlotta Franco for development of the architectural concept and with support for the project from GICO Studio.