Alberonero (IT)

In-Land. How to become a place

August 7th – August 13th 2022

The Workshop

What does Landscape mean? What do you see, where do you stand?

In this workshop, I invite participants to experiment with a method of working with and in places that I developed by intervening over the years in different territories. It is a set of conceptual and hands-on tools that have accompanied me in forests, plantations, glades, volcano slopes, historical villages, or suburbs.

Domaine de Boisbuchet is the ideal environment to experience Nature in its creative dynamics of interaction, growth, decay and transformation. Concepts belonging to the “natural” realm become metaphors in which our deepest being is reflected. The creative act stems from the need to find a way to participate in this process and accompany the outer temporality in order to rediscover a time within our self. We are part of Nature.

Explore, wander, fortify your senses. Identify. / Settle down. Choose your place, take care of it. Focus. / Express your design intentions, make choices. Document. / Give shape to your storytelling. Alter your space temporarily, transform yourself too. / Look for functionality in the elements around you, listen to what materials want to tell you. Train lateral thinking by combining techniques with affection and imagination. / Recover a primal simplicity, reduce, learn how to work with emptiness. / Feel free to fail and start again.

Following this multi-step process, made of a series of exercises carried out in a dimension of play and exchange, participants are encouraged to establish an intimate and active dialogue with a place within the Domaine. First we will act and create individually, then we will interact together by developing an installation/performance that will connect all the single events.

Language makes us a community. After 5 days of experimentation, we will have questioned the concepts of natural and artificial, and developed our alphabet of words, images, materials, postures and practices, closely connected with the site we have been inhabiting.

Designers, artists, architects, and all other explorers, thinkers and storytellers from different backgrounds and disciplines are welcomed to come “in-land.”

Workshop Partners

Alberonero [lit. black tree] is a designer, painter, sculptor and sometimes a farmer.

Born in Lodi (1991), he soon started experimenting with painting in relationship to the physical space through graffiti techniques. While studying Interior Design at the Politecnico di Milano, he had the chance to merge experience with theory and to embrace a cross-disciplinary practice.

In 2012 he started focusing on the study of colour perception and on the research of a code that could minimize the visual language. For six years, he intervened in public spaces by painting sequences of colours ordered in a geometric grid, as a tool of investigation of the connections between mathematics, poetry, and sensation.

Since 2017, his interest moved towards the matter and the construction of devices made of poor materials, linked to the building and agriculture’s world such as concrete, iron, wood, agricultural nets, but also textiles, plaster, and glass, telling us about a “supernatural” reality. His practice finds form in nature, in installations born from a careful listening to the site, from the will to “become a place” and participate in the landscape in a poetic sense.

Alberonero has carried out installations, exhibitions and workshops in Italy, France, Ukraine, Spain, Poland, Germany, Indonesia, the United States and Saudi Arabia, among others.

His last project Campo [lit. field] stems from his need to reset his being in Nature.
From 2020 to 2021, he lived in symbiosis with a field of 290 poplar trees, destined to be cut down, in the countryside of Campogalliano (IT). Immersed daily among this ensemble of trees, he performed, created temporary installations, filmed, photographed, and interacted with the life of this environment: a synthesis and symbol of nature as a whole.

The name Alberonero was born in the Lagorai Alps in Trentino Alto Adige. The black trees were the last figures before the rocks and the sky, hurling themselves towards infinity, dry and bare. “Trees are my companions and I wish to be a tree.”

www.alberonero.it

Housing

  • Accommodation & food are included

  • We can accommodate for special catering

  • All participants sleep in dormitories

  • To book a private room or bring additional guests, get in touch: workshops@boisbuchet.org

Education

  • Our staff are available to help you conceptualize & produce your designs

  • Tools & materials are provided by Boisbuchet

  • All workshops are taught in English

  • The number of participants is limited to 22

Activities