SILVIA GAFFURINI - SPONGE CITY

SILVIA GAFFURINI - SPONGE CITY - a leap

When does art stop meeting our expectations of vision, and when does an artist leap forward to extend the medium into new territory?

There is often a leap of faith involved — a movement into what might be called the “zone” of creative expansion, where the mind searches for a broader sensory language capable of conveying experiences that exceed the limits of a single medium. Creative flow contains many facets, constantly shifting between perception, intuition, experimentation, and material discovery.

In Photography Into Sculpture: An Homage and an Update, Silvia Gaffurini’s Sponge City extends photography beyond the framed image and into sculptural and environmental space. Composed of metal rods, magnets, embossed photographs, rocks, sponges, and living plant matter, the installation reflects the artist’s ongoing exploration into the porous relationship between urban systems and natural life.

Following her artist residency in China, Gaffurini became deeply interested in the concept of Sponge Cities — urban environments designed to absorb, retain, and work alongside water as a living ecological force. Described by the artist as terrestrial cells of life, these amphibious environments became the catalyst for a broader investigation into interspecies relationships within contemporary urban landscapes.

Q: Your work in Sponge City has clearly moved into sculpture rather than remaining a framed photographic work. Was this a natural evolution for your practice? How do you think about photography as sculpture today?

Silvia Gaffurini: Yes, it was a natural evolution. With embossed photography, I had already moved beyond the limits of two-dimensionality; with Sponge City, I sought to further expand my practice and experiment — above all in response to a creative necessity tied to the narrative of this project.

These urban amphibious environments, explored following my artist residency in China, reawakened my desire to address themes of interspecies coexistence within the urban landscape, which has now become the central focus of my current artistic research.

By hybridizing photography with sculpture and installation, I believe the mode of reception itself can also express and strengthen the message.

Through Sponge City, Gaffurini creates something both contemplative and speculative by merging photography, sculpture, installation, architecture, and ecological thinking. Inspired by the adaptive intelligence found within nature itself, the work moves beyond photography as image alone and instead becomes an experiential structure — one that invites viewers to move through shifting relationships between the built environment, organic life, and states of continual change.

Emerging through an ongoing engagement with science, ecology, and interdependent systems, these structures reflect a life-supporting inquiry into how we inhabit and understand the world around us. Beginning with photography and gradually extending into installation, the work constructs environments that feel adaptive, suspended, and in continual evolution.

The materials involved form delicate structures that feel simultaneously engineered and organic.

Beneath these evolving forms is also an awareness of architecture, permanence, and material ethics that connects back to Silvia’s engagement with John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture and her earlier body of work The Eighth Lamp, where questions of structure, human care, and material presence first began to take shape within her practice.

Yet rather than remaining fixed within historical frameworks, Silvia allows these ideas to evolve through an open and intuitive relationship to process and environment. Working with readily available materials and responsive systems, the installations remain fluid rather than static — capable of shifting, adapting, and reconfiguring themselves according to each site-specific context.

The influence of Sponge Cities becomes especially significant here: ecological systems designed not to resist nature, but to absorb, retain, and work alongside natural cycles. In a similar way, the installations themselves operate as permeable structures — absorbing atmosphere, architecture, movement, and environmental conditions while continually transforming in response to the spaces they inhabit.

Photography remains present throughout, though no longer confined to the wall or image plane. Instead, it expands into structure, texture, surface, embossing, spatial intervention, and material presence.

What ultimately emerges is not simply installation as form, but an uncharted territory between image, object, architecture, ecology, and living system — searching for forms capable of absorbing the uncertainties, tensions, and living rhythms of the environments they enter.

 PHOTO CREDIT: VC projects