MOAI

The works of Urbansolid drives us to critically rethink everyday’ objects. Objects capable in some way to condition our daily life acquire a new proposition of meaning. For this installation, Urbansolid uses as its subject matter something which, although not part of our everyday life, is characterised by a strong cultural bearing: the Moai’s from Easter Island. These large-scale sculptures represent an entire civilisation in their synthesis.

Urbansolid proposes a decontextualisation that is not only geographical but also temporal, creating that short circuit typical of his work, trying to give new meaning to an old message. Once immersed in the contemporary urban context, daubed like the walls or monuments of our cities, these vandalised artefacts acquire a new meaning.

This new urban dimension generates a mirror effect: we are able to grasp the destruction and environmental and cultural impoverishment only by observing contexts far away from us, not realising the decay that affects us more closely, that of the reality in which we are immersed. We know how to recognise something that is ‘other’, but we are almost never able to achieve a full social and individual awareness of our decay.

Through vandalisation, the Moai, the symbol of a civilisation that has destroyed its ecosystem, is altered in its meanings, disfigured, dirtied and standardised to the new urban context that hosts it.

Urbansolid’s work invites the viewer to reflect on these issues by amplifying their paradox.

The work poses a question as simple as it is direct: has the lesson been assimilated or are we, globally, doomed to end up like Rapa Nui?

Up to our sensitivity to decide if this is a warning, a mere statement of facts, or a surrender.