Leisure

Leisure, 2022, flagpoles, golf balls, white marble and bricks.
Installed inside the Macellum archaeological site in Pozzuoli as the winning project of “Flegreo per il contemporaneo” open call and residency.

Leisure is a relational, participatory installation consisting of a temporary free-access golf course installed inside an Ancient Roman ruin in the Pozzuoli-Naples area - one of many sites that were once included in the city’s public spaces and now lack the funds to stay open as a historical site.

To create a golf course inside an archeological site is to operate a form of sacrilege, introducing a playful, trivial dimension into a sacralised, landmark space.

This sacrilege, operated throughout a week of residency in Pozzuoli, provided the opportunity to interact with the local community and reflect with them on other kinds of sacrileges that have become more and more common in recent years, i.e. all the “revitalisation” projects that transform public spaces - with the excuse of security or decay - into semi-privatised areas, devoted to tourism and entertainment, restricting people’s behaviours to a small set of activities that are easily monetised or exploited for commercial or political purposes.

The installation consisted of a sculptural part, placed inside the main archeological area, and an interactive playable green, carved out of the grass of the observation deck, where people came to play together with the artist and other mediators, who engaged them in conversation about the meaning of the work and the role that distraction and leisure play in the current situation of public space.