Change of elements

 The works of the series change of elements  were created after a stay in Yemen. They consist of stacks of flat tiles with a stony structure resembling that of building blocks that seem to have been directly sawn from the rocks. The works refer to the local architecture, that both in colour and shape blends into the landscape and to the flat grey loam plates that are used as building material. These tiles are placed to dry in piles in the windows. Sometimes some colour is added around the windows, red, blue or yellow pigment mixed in with the lime, to rhythmically interrupt the large grey surfaces.

 “ Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo’s cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements.
Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan’s mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translation from the Italian by William Weaver,
Vintage Books, London, 1997, p. 37.