ELASETESALE
INSTALLATION X N'ORMA
CHIARAMONTE GULFI
2022
ElasetesalE is a site-specific installation, designed by Giuseppe Arezzi for N’orma, a small countryside hotel in Chiaramonte Gulfi.
A few years ago, the clients, Andreina Iebole and Maurizio Di Gregorio, found they had 150 bottles without their normal green glass bases, made to have been used for a project that never got off the ground. These bottles which had been set aside still remained in their memories so, in the autumn of 2021, the designer Giuseppe Arezzi from Ragusa, was called in to propose his own personal interpretation of the unused containers.
This is how ElasetesalE was born: a palindrome, two-faced and almost circular, a 15.55-metre-long line consisting of 102 bottles, one inside the other, with the whole resting horizontally on slim iron trestles. The water flows inside the glass containers and then into a large funnel set up in the ground, which collects it and pushes it back into the circuit, without dispersion. The whole is operated by a simple red tap connected to a water system.
Giuseppe Arezzi: “The bottle I was shown is a perfect, anonymous object. It was enough to introduce it into the agricultural landscape and connect it to the few purely rural buildings, now a hotel and the residence of the owners.
ElasetesalE is of raw authenticity, fully immersed in its context, without any infatuation with the past or any other predictable tradition; recognizable to those who live in these places and also to those who discover them; contemporary in its essence. The installation is a celebration of water as a primary commodity to be preserved and not wasted. In its intrinsic contradiction, here it is the bottle that pours the liquid into the funnel and not viceversa, so as to return it to the earth from whose sources it springs.
ElasetesalE (it means: and thirst is increasing) is a message in itself: drought on our planet will bring thirst and overheating is not caused by the scarcity of water: it is the lack of knowledge and respect for the environment that we inhabit which is the problem.”