Casalgrande is a small town in the suburbs of Reggio Emilia, Italy. Since 1960 the town’s prosperity has grown thanks to local industries in the ceramic sector, which became nowadays the main commercial resource. In 2010 Casalgrande Padana, the main factory, commissioned the realisation of a sculpture by Kengo Kuma which has been positioned at the centre of a roundabout in a principal street that connects two main towns of the area.

This sculpture’s relevance is high as a monument of the city, and appears to be one of the main results when searching “Casalgrande’s monument” in Google. However, it does not contain any messages or representations related to the town or citizens. Considering that, what characteristics should a monument have in order to be defined as such? More precisely, what is a monument?

Recording history and embodying the concept of eternity are factors that can be considered when defining the roles of monuments. On the 12th of December, 2015, at 2 am, a car crash damaged a portion of Kengo Kuma’s sculpture. If a monument's purpose is to document and record such incidents, should it have been left damaged to represent this fact? "Mr. Kuma, Why Do I Keep Crashing Into You?" is an essay that reflects on the roles and definitions of monuments and their connection with public art. The essay delves into this matter by analyzing the artwork CCCloud, created by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, which has been continuously and accidentally destroyed by car accidents over the years.

CCCloud after the car accident in February 2022.

Extract
[...] Italy has a long following of conservation and preservation of the artistic heritage, an obsession to maintain cities of the past intact, as a way to remember and keep track of what happened. CCCloud restoration shows an effort to repristinate the original shape of an element by recreating exactly the same appearance before the car damage. The structure is no longer altered and any trace of a possible current representation of Casalgrande is erased. At the same time, when a monument is destroyed, its composition is modified and adjusted, again and again, each added fragment starts to become part of the monument. However, can the act of building and deleting parts be understood as an action that reflects the purpose and mission of a monument? In this scenario of changing and maintaining images of cities and societies through the interaction with monuments and artworks, these symbols become passive elements that suffer human actions, which have exerted their force by destroying or removing parts.
What happened in Casalgrande, with Kengo Kuma’s sculpture, was not intentional. The destruction occured in a surprising way, as the result of a series of events and decisions from the architect and the factory. The car crash caused a structure’s modification that made the artwork look ruined and incomplete, resulting in an unusual aesthetic. What would the consequences be if this were to happen to monuments? When monuments undergo alterations in their composition, and since the role of monuments is to record and represent history, is it possible to imagine a future monument, free from restrictions, where its shape is moulded by events and not restricted to human actions? [...]
This essay is part of Ways of Making, a collective online and printed publication. If you have any questions or you are interested in reading the full text, please contact me.





©2024 – Giulia Braglia