La Distanza della Luna is a site-specific performance existing in the collective memory of the people of Fontecchio, a medieval village located in the Province of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region of Italy. During a new moon night in September, the inhabitants of Fontecchio, nearby villages, and the city of L’Aquila, came together to lift a replica of the moon. On April 6 of 2009, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake hit L'Aquila and the surrounding villages. 309 people died, 70,000 were left homeless, and 56 villages in Italy’s mountainous heart were devastated. Twelve years later, hundreds of cranes are still meticulously reconstructing buildings covered by scaffold cladding. Every day, locals see and hear this heavy machinery rigging dreams and lifting nightmares. Similar to a deus ex machina, this moon was a theatrical prop that was suddenly rigged down to provide a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble nostalgia. It was a “moon” lifted by a crane that for two years has been carrying debris and delivering construction materials to the central area of Fontecchio.

On one of my first nights in this comune, I witnessed a full moon rising from a balcony of the Fontecchio International Airport, a residency project by the artist Todd Thomas Brown. From my point of view, the moon aligned with the tallest crane in the village. This was the impetus for me to build a 3-meter diameter geodesic sphere made with almost 800 rolls of paper paneled with cladding used to cover buildings under reconstruction. We lit this structure with LED lights powered by lithium batteries. While designing and engineering the moon, a close friend referred me to Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. Upon reading “The Distance from the Moon”, I realized that...Read Full Text