The Transparency of the Ground
Pavilion for Villegiardini
Site: GreenItaly, Parma
Year 2025
Management and Coordination: Urges Srl, Gruppo Valagussa
Collaborators in the construction: Andrea Gaspari
Plant supply: Vivai Nord
Technical Sponsor: Italiana Terricci
Client: Villegiardini and Urges Srl
The installation The Transparency of the Ground continues the line of research initiated with Euroflora 2025, where the relationship between surface and depth, transparency and ground, became a way to reflect on the space between vision and matter.
At GreenItaly 2025, this reflection takes the form of a smaller, more concentrated landscape — a pavilion conceived for VilleGiardini, the historic Italian magazine dedicated to garden culture and landscape design.
The Transparency of the Ground invites reflection on stratification as a principle shared by art and landscape.
It weaves together two intertwined dimensions: on one side, transparency as an artistic process, capable of compressing depth and complexity into a layered surface; on the other, the transparency of the landscape itself — a living ground that becomes a tactile image, where the visible surface alludes to a hidden but vital depth made of roots, relations, and continuous dialogue between human and natural forces.
Both dimensions reveal a process of continuous modification, unfolding through time and combining a visual and tactile register.
This idea is spatially translated into three distinct landscape fragments enclosed within a light wooden frame.
A first layer of vertical rods defines a regular and permeable envelope, filtering light and perception.
Within this, a more irregular layer of threads draws invisible connections, evoking the hidden exchanges that animate the underground world.
Each of the three inner portions presents a different condition of landscape — from cultivated to spontaneous, from dense to rarefied — composing a single, stratified ground where transparency becomes both image and space.
The pavilion occupied an 8×8-metre area within the GreenItaly Fair in Parma.
A rhythmic structure of vertical wooden elements defines its perimeter, dividing the space along its four sides.
Upon this frame, a first layer of thin wooden slats evokes the image of an abstract landscape, allowing glimpses of what lies within.
A second, more fluid layer of string defines a freer geometry, in dialogue with the more rigid outer grid, suggesting the coexistence of order and chance, structure and breath — a spatial metaphor for transparency itself.
