Vertigo _ Sylvio Giardina

Promoted by Roma Capitale – Assessorato alla Crescita culturale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and presented inside Pavilion 9B at Mattatoio, the installation VERTIGO conceived by Sylvio Giardina is an opportunity to explore the artistic sensibility of the Italian fashion designer who has been active for over fifteen years in the field of Haute Couture and who, since the beginning of his career, has distinguished himself for a know-how founded on unconditional attention to tailoring, on an innovative look at tradition and on a multifaceted attitude to experimentation. For Sylvio Giardina, art is inspiration, fashion is the instrument. Within its imaginary, these two entities are complementary and mutually indispensable, and continuously contaminate without rigid boundaries. The VERTIGO project, which is inaugurated in conjunction with the 2019 edition of Altaroma, embodies this propensity of Giardina, and is presented as an intervention halfway between the installation and the performance designed to convey, in a symbolic way, the inspirations, the genesis and the reflections that led to the precise connotations of the five dresses which constitute the first examples of the new Haute Couture SS2019 collection. Citing the seductive and evocative visual effects of Shadow Art – artistic expression aimed at creating immersive environments and poetic visions through the backlighting of three-dimensional objects – the installation involves the viewer in a subdued dialogue of quotes and references between the chiaroscuro interplays generated from the projections on objects in cut crystal from the author’s personal collection and the geometrical minuteness of the precious inlaid tulle and organza dresses, which impose themselves in the space as graceful and evanescent presences but strong of a masterly elaborated sartorial soul. The stratification of transparent materials – the crystal, the tulle – and the immersive structure of the installation – made of light, sound, shadows and volumes – drag the viewer into an audio-visual vertigo and into the timeless and suspended dimension of a magic lantern beyond measure “bringing to mind the myth of the cave of Plato, the deceptiveness of the shadow as a metaphor of knowledge, sensitive and intellective, but also the idea of memory of personal experience that reappears in the form of an obsessive description of a detail or, vice versa, as a magnified image of a lacunose and blurred memory”
(excerpt from the text by Emanuela Nobile Mino).

Mattatoio, Padiglione 9B, Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 4 – Rome

The installation will be open until February 27th