The Transparency of the Ground
Pavilion for Villegiardini
Site: GreenItaly, Parma
Year 2025
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.
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.
Design: Matteo Fraschini Architetto
Client: Villegiardini
Technical Coordination: Urges Srl, Impresa Valagussa
Botanical Selection: Elisabetta Pozzetti
Construction Assistance: Andrea Gaspari
Plant Supply: Vivai Nord
Technical Partner: Italianaterricci
Related projects
