Get the best of Domus straight to your inbox!

Pellegrini Mocellin: Crash

The renovation of the historic Hotel Locarno in Rome offered the opportunity to artists Nicola Pellegrini and Ottonella Mocellin of creating a site-specific installation, suspended between the overwhelming desire to break everything and the will to preserve fragments of stories, sounds and charm.

“To make a work of art out of demolition, shedding light on a hidden story that may reveal unattended relations. Renovation is an idea that withholds memory”. This is the concept of the event called Crash which will take place on Friday, November, 15 at Hotel Locarno in Rome.

The idea of the Crash artistic installation by Nicola Pellegrini and Ottonella Mocellin was born thanks to an intuition shared by the hotel owners, Maria Teresa Celli and Caterina Valente. What better occasion than the restlyling of Hotel Locarno to host a large artistic event?

The artists, Nicola Pellegrini and Ottonella Mocellin, explain their installation at Hotel Locarno: “Between public and private, movement and idleness, a place that is not a place, a hotel is where a person lives differently than they would at their own houses. Some hotels may become homes for some people but certain hotels like Hotel Locarno, with it’s uniquely decorated rooms, it’s history and it’s cozy atmosphere is much more of a home than any other hotel. With the double vision of who is used to observing the world from another point of view, we have decided to find these traces and make them resurface so everyone can see them.”

Their site-specific installation has been projected with the goal to reveal the unstable balance between the overwhelming desire to break everything in order to create something new and the will to preserve a memory: fragments of stories, sounds and charm that composes a narration which is made of many voices, some which are broken down but flowing at the same time.