Montevideo Tobias Rehberger, 1999

Tobias Rehberger called by the curators Florian Matzner and Angela Vettese for Arte all'Arte IV, has chosen the ancient Via delle Volte in Colle di Val d'Elsa.

"Tobias Rehberger realised the work Montevideo in Colle di Val d'Elsa inside an old covered walkway, a sort of gallery overlooked by private houses and warehouses. Here, the artist has installed about one hundred and fifty crystal lamps, a characteristic local production, each one hand-blown and coloured with different pigmentations at one of the last workshops in Colle that is still able to perform these processes.

Rehberger then placed the lamps on the ceiling of the walkway in groups, by types (white cylinders, red spheres, double purple cones...) as if they were clusters or crowded families. Then he created a connection between two geographical poles that, on the globe, stand at the vertices of a diameter, places in the world where the day-night rhythms flow in a staggered manner. Montevideo, the city chosen to connect to Colle di Val d'Elsa, is part of the Southern Hemisphere; thanks to an Internet connection, the lights of the Tuscan walkway are switched on when it gets dark in Montevideo, when the inhabitants of those houses turn on their household lights.

So it is as if their artificial illumination crosses the Earth and pops up on the other side, while characteristic objects from the interior decoration of houses are shown outside, in a street of an Italian historic centre. The appearance of the installation is spectacular and welcomes the visitor as a feast of emotions, but behind this open and playful side lies a less immediate level of interpretation.

For decades, the cultural debate has tended to privilege what is international over what is local. The development of the Internet, but also of a new awareness of the importance of regional cultures, leads us today to conceive globalisation not as a cancellation of the specific characteristics of places, but rather as a way of enhancing them all: the wonder aroused by the work is meant to be a reminder of the ability to marvel at what is simple, but at the same time, the fruit of the conjunction of local manual traditions and the knowledge of technology."

Florian Matzner and Angela Vettese, 'Arte all'Arte IV', 1999