Mnemosfera Lancetti
elisi - Marta Elisa Cecchi and Clorinda Sissi Galasso
Mnemosphere is one of those words that you understand even before they’re defined. A neologism with a plural nature, created to describe the intertwining of memories, emotions, and atmospheres, and the way these take shape in places, even imperceptibly transforming the experience of those places.
Mnemospheres are everywhere. We often don’t notice them, yet they settle along our path, in the distracted glances we cast at our surroundings. They inhabit places, points, and vistas, and follow unexpected paths. They emerge in the ordinary landscape, in repeated gestures, and in the transit spaces we pass through every day.
Milano Lancetti station is one such place. An infrastructure marked by departures, returns, waits, and crossings, defined more by its function than by its identity. Within it, spazioSERRA has for years created a break in the flow and constitutes a perceptual interlude in the station’s rhythm. A sort of unexpected monument, capable of inserting itself into the daily rush and interrupting its automatism. The gaze veers off course, the pace slows. Waiting for a train becomes an unexpected experience.
Mnemosfera Lancetti takes shape from this condition, making spazioSERRA the subject of the work itself. By replicating itself within its own, the space becomes a souvenir of itself, a gigantic boule à neige through which the experience of the place is preserved and made available once again to the gaze. The duplication takes the form of a diorama, a setting that stages itself through props and backdrops, creating a landscape that is both familiar and altered. There is no geographical distance to bridge. The original and its copy coexist in the same space, blurring the boundary between what is experienced and what is remembered.
Within this landscape, confetti serve as a dynamic element, drifting across the scene like particles of memory, disrupting the stillness of the space before settling into ever-changing patterns. This movement constantly reshapes the landscape’s form — always the same and yet always different — introducing the unstable nature of memory, which no representation can definitively capture.
Mnemosfera Lancetti, cyclically shaken, becomes a mnemonic device and restores to the space the ability to tell its own story, inviting passersby to stop and observe with fresh eyes. The station continues to live out its own present rhythm, while spazioSERRA preserves and renews its past.