Umberto Boccioni in nanometer version

Is it possible to transform a sculpture more than one metre high into a micro sculpture no bigger than a spermatozoon? American artist Namsal Siedlecki, in collaboration with Dr. Sara Nocentini (INRiM researcher) – representative of the group led by Prof. Diederik S. Wiersma at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS) – has created a nanometric version of the famous sculpture “Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio” (1913) by futurist artist Umberto Boccioni. But that’s not all. Siedlecki has released the micro sculpture into space, depriving it of its staticity and weight, and initiating it into a perpetual movement to which the title of the original work refers. It happened last October 19th at Spazio Taverna, Rome, during an evening meeting dedicated to the project. Spazio Taverna opened to the public last September. It is a new centre for contemporary artistic experimentation, a “space of unpredictability”, to quote Ludovico Pratesi, director. Siedlecki’s project supports this definition.

Starting from scientific studies on nanometric measurements of the Coronavirus, the artist has implemented his research in close collaboration with LENS laboratory. The realization of the project required the use of a three-dimensional printer to scan a laser beam that would polymerize a drop of liquid resin, making it solid. The sculpture is 140 microns high and covered with a thin layer of gold (10 nm). It was photographed with an electron microscope at the National Institute of Metrological Research. “At a time in history when fear of the invisible affects our lives, we created a sculpture that lives in apparent absence, but is present in all of us and in no one”, says the press release. Released from its original weight and at the mercy of the surrounding air, the sculpture devoted to movement is finally free to “go with the flow”.