How do scientists relate to the volcano?
And you, what personal relationship do you have with it?
Mount Etna is an inexhaustible source of data that we can measure with appropriate instruments or simply with our bodies.
In this workshop we have developed a collective visual language, a vocabulary of signs, a grammar to encode, translate, share and communicate what the territory tells us.
The Etnean landscape is stratified: from the coast to the craters, from the centre of the earth to the clouds, it presents itself to us with different textures, each with its own invisible language, on different scales and with different structures.
We have collected and reproduced these textures in a series of tiles, square elements, creating a shared archive to tell the story of both Mount Etna and the connection with this place.
We started with a walk on the Sartorius Mountains to discover the tactile quality of the landscape: through small exercises and simple gestures, we explored the deep time of geology, translating it into a series of patterns, focusing on the rock and atmospheric formations that characterise the volcanic territory, from the magma reservoirs underground to the horizon and the atmosphere.
Our research has been guided by water, by its multiple forms and by the traces it carves into the landscape and into our lives.
We thus transformed the abstract into the tactile: recording sensations, recognising patterns and translating the elements of the territory through a sensory approach.
After building a texture library, a collective and shared atlas of square tiles with which to encode the patterns of the area, working in a group we translated the essence of the volcano into five design proposals for a series of scarfs that will be prototyped by Lanificio Leo.
We finally exhibited our projects in an exhibition set up at the Academy.
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