The first time I entered the Church of S. Maria di Colle, designed almost fifty years ago by the architect Vincenzo Tutarini, I was struck by the rarest quality a building, a plastic structure, can possess: that of capturing a process in a static form.
The Church of S. Maria di Colle in Perugia is a strange place that conveys the strong sensation of a progressive and unstoppable movement, of an irremediable imbalance that unsettles, as every strong work worthy of the name must do, and it does so within a formal and structural rigour and an "unbalanced" equilibrium that are worthy of note.
Add to this the "truth" and rawness of the material used, reinforced concrete, a symbol of our cities all too often neglected and singled out as responsible for environmental and architectural disasters, and which here instead reveals its direct beauty, without mediation, not devoid of a refined harshness.

The religious building and the challenge of architecture: a mark in the historical context of the City
In presenting my intervention I cannot but retrace, briefly, the historical context in which I was called to work. This historical framing too accounts for a dynamism of the religious community that follows and meets the needs of civil society: to a suburban expansion of the city, with the creation of new districts, the Church of Perugia, by decree of Archbishop Mons. Pietro Parente, on 1 July 1957, responded by suppressing the Parish of S. Maria di Colle in Porta S. Pietro (later converted into a Musical Auditorium), transferring the title of Parish to a new building down the valley, along via dei Filosofi. The design was entrusted to the architect Vincenzo Tutarini[1].
This is one of the earliest parishes of Perugia, founded in the time of Pope Honorius III and contemporary with another important structure, the Convento di Monteluce, the first convent of S. Chiara after the original seat of S. Damiano in Assisi, which right now is undergoing a strong and important urban regeneration[2].

Tuning the gaze: the mechanism, not the modules
Here I found in architecture what I think of art that can truly be called art, namely nothing to do with decoration, fine craftsmanship, handiwork or even the great exercise of technique: the perfect wrong note. Fundamental to entering a different and organic harmonic system is the shift of focus. What must be tuned, in fact, is not the apparently wrong note (because it is different) but the observer himself, his gaze, his perception.

There is, in fact, something that does not immediately add up in this Church, and it is precisely this that constitutes the constant stimulus to the disquiet of those who stand within it.
I am convinced that this intuition is by far the stroke of genius of the architect Tutarini, his true intellectual and structural "manifesto". I am convinced that it was truly ahead of its time, as a conception, when it was devised, so much as to appear contemporary today, a fact that leads one to admire not only the idea of Vincenzo Tutarini but also his courage in proposing and realising it. As far as I am concerned, the empathy was immediate, total, "easy", and the idea of the need to conceive an interior worthy of the structure appeared to me a logical consequence. In a year of reflection and development of ideas there was no pause, and it is as if the structure itself had suggested the solutions to me.

A fundamental note. At the root of an attunement with the original idea, even within the autonomy of one's own conception, lies a mechanism that revealed itself to me at once. It is a conceptual and pragmatic error to think of coherence with the structure in terms of modules. The slavish repetition of these leads to nothing but a weak scaled-down repetition of what is already powerful in its original dimensions and form. What instead happened to me here, and revealed its power as a cognitive process, is the immediate, natural attunement with the structural "mechanism" underlying the building. This is the key to being able to begin creating. Had I not perceived this, I would not even have been interested in the challenge. The rhythm, the counterpoints, the accents by which the various elements stand in relation to one another constitute the innermost core of the problem.
The counterpoints… fundamental here and elsewhere. But here we find them as in a musical score: counterpoints on the plane of directions, on the plane of materials, on the plane of light. One might say, to borrow a metaphor from mathematical analysis, that it is not the single coordinates that matter so much as the function that binds them.

Urban, primordial, archaic, contemporary: the oxymorons of Santa Maria di Colle
The Church in question appears as a crossing between a Cathedral, a post-industrial Archaeology and an ancient Temple, absolute and at the same time uncomfortable. It is right that a place where Truth is spoken of should be uncomfortable, in the sense that it must stir a disquiet that impels one to move and not to die in the illusoriness of the customary. Probably my coming from London, where I live for much of the year, from the London of post-industrialisation where one experiences the backlash of the post-empire, with all that this brings in positive terms of cultural contamination and hybridisation, but also of the disquiet of continual displacements (displacements of thought, as well as physical ones), allowed me to enter at once into its architectural mechanism, somewhat hybrid, as I can be myself.

Art, not decoration. Poetry, not stuccoes. Signs, not services. The anti-anaesthetic Church, the nomadic Church
The Church of S.M. di Colle is certainly an asset for Perugia, and the challenge of rethinking and giving new meaning to its interior, so that it comes into harmony with the admirable architectural framework, is a challenge of great responsibility, yet it did not generate in me a moment's hesitation. At last an occasion in which a contemporary artist meets a powerful and controversial architecture where he can conceive spaces in artistic and not decorative terms, with the contemporary charge of thought within a form rather than of a form without thought which, as can be seen in numerous cases, becomes anaesthetising.
This reflection springs spontaneously from my very identity as an artist, the need for the sign. We have been excessively overwhelmed by a mentality that tends to regulate everything, forgetting that beauty is by its nature rebellious to conventions, a mentality that, by turning everything into service, in reality renders it amorphous, aseptic, devoid of life and identity with all the precious irregularities it entails: anaesthetic, precisely, losing the stimulus to reflection bartered for comfort.
Now the Church of S. M. di Colle is anti-anaesthetic by definition, an invitation to the disquiet that is vital for breaking the vicious circle of the state of drowsiness so current today, in which everything seems to resemble very much a protean and fanciful replica of "Prozac".

We urgently need to speak again of signs rather than services, because, paradoxically, this is precisely the service that man needs today. Just as we urgently need to speak again of art and not decoration, of poetry and not "craft". So I thought that everything constituting the interior of the Church should become sign, starting from the structural and formal foundations of the architectural system in which it is contained. Did the Church of Santa Maria di Colle capture a dynamic instance in a static tension? Well then, every element, in its specificity, will be an extension of this concept. The representing of the dynamism of life, and not of death in stasis.
To arrest processes that seem on the very point of being accomplished, in a strange crossed dislocation of the before and the after, where it is therefore not actually possible to establish anteriority and posteriority but a while, an unstable and vibrant while.
To convey the idea of the permanent impermanent, which curiously comes to connect with the idea of the nomad tent, which as a structure does not represent, as we think in our Western trivialisation, indefinite wandering for its own sake, but rather the precise concept of a mobile-stable home, the solid identity that travels the world carrying within it this idea of the dynamic oxymoron of the still-movement. And, not by chance, among the structural meanings of the Church of S. M. di Colle is also that of the tent. The portal I conceived is, after all, the access to a tent . On these underlying lines the spatial and material solutions I devised were articulated.

Significant fulcrums of the structure: a redefinition towards the altar
One of the features of S. M. di Colle that called for a fundamental response is the indefiniteness of a fulcrum point, which, as regards the conception of a Christian-Catholic Church, coincides with the altar. Indeed, the process of inclination and rotation of the structural portals remained unfinished, in the sense of the diminution of the vertical dimensions and of the convergence towards a hypothetical point of arrival.

The apsidal wall constituted almost an artificial backdrop that prevented the structure from fully expressing its dynamic character.
How to ensure that the apse found its placement as point of arrival while remaining within the structure? The solution arises from a mechanism that is an integral part of the whole structure: the counter-melody. It happens, in fact, that in the vault beams the inclination is directed in the opposite sense and is therefore counterpointed by the sagittal direction of the axial vertex of the vault, which unites the right and left parts. The redefinition of the point of arrival occurs through three levels of formal process: a chromatic one, one of elevation, and one of progressive alignment of the diagonals.

Let us start from the latter. In the idea of a unitary resolution, the geometries of the floor arose from the projection of the vault geometries. By the mechanism identified earlier, they clearly indicate an "outward" direction opposite to the apsidal one. The first operation to bring them back within the logic of the imbalance of the portals was the insertion at the centre of a "wedge"-shaped corridor that narrows towards the apse and that immediately draws the direction back in, resolving the theme of opposites. The second operation is the identification of a geometry of the presbytery that, over the span of its five steps, presents irregular heptagons with an axial vertex turned inward, with an angle that gradually opens until the straight angle of the square (which identifies the point of ending and resolution of the motion) of the bema where the altar is placed.

The Body is process: floors and walls as "vesture", that is, beauty, the chromatic, is the true heritage
In some way there is realised in this architectural structure a kind of metonymy between signifying existence and process. Every manifestation of being finds its catalyst in the body, which represents process par excellence. When we think the body it is already elsewhere, yet, indisputably, it nonetheless retains a stable identity. A paraphrase of another existential given: the possibility of the infinite being contained in the finite and vice versa, in a kind of osmotic reciprocal signification.
The structural paradox of this Church expresses well this paradigm of an ineluctable and continual exodus of the real towards a fulfilment which, however, is already realised, but which does not deny, indeed exalts, the possibility of a pre-existing and constantly forthcoming permanence.
It becomes clear that all the themes, including those of the materials, in this context become a challenge to standardised thought, revisiting the common hierarchies of priority. What is the sense of a material in a context of this kind, of great spiritual, conceptual and structural reflection? I gave a dialogic answer in the sense of a catharsis of the meaning of the durable: from my point of view the durable is what the material or the structure gives back in terms of beauty, of harmony, of perception, of inspiration; and not the overriding obsession with "physical" duration over time. For only an apparent paradox, in fact, this search for "duration" in the face of living thought becomes the materialistic negation of becoming and therefore, in consequence, the negation of the possibility of the "transfiguration" of reality. Beauty is the tangible sign of reality, not vice versa.
I return once more to the concept that here the game being played is that of meaning: that is, of art. The term "dialogic" I used refers to the fact that precisely in this building the confrontation and co-presence between the archaic and the future can be realised, in a kind of passing of the baton which here, given the peculiarities I have very succinctly set out, has a sense bound to the general intuition.

The geometries of the floor will be in an ancient material, marble, while the chromatic fields will be in resinous materials which, better than any other in this context, resolve together the original intentions of the architect, my chromatic scheme, and modernity with its charge of mutability and constant redefinition.
A space like this implies the absoluteness and mystical depth of an ancient temple within an urban conception and context. It follows that the very concept of adornment loses its sense; and so its place is taken by the mysticism of space, the sublimation of the sensations. And it goes without saying that light acquires a primary role to this end, and light manifests itself in chromatic perception. The whole path I conceived for the Church, with its resolution in the apsidal point of the altar, is based on the chromatic progression that accompanies, clothes, the structural progression.
The extruded "trapezoidal portals", which constitute the ingenious framework of S. M. di Colle, divide it into six sectors: the geometries on the floor will be the projection, as I mentioned, of the vault design of these portals, and so the floor too will have a subdivision into six sectors. The six sectors on the floor, on the walls, on the vault will each have a uniform yet vibrant monochrome value, lightening as one proceeds towards the apse, which will be white. The path from the entrance to the apse will be characterised by a chromatic progression towards the light, from dark to light, from shadow to the light of mystical and structural fulfilment.

I would thus like to introduce a reflection on the possibility of beginning to think of the floor and the walls no longer in terms of floor and walls, but of a veritable vesture: a chromatic vesture, which represents the first powerful instrument of immersion into a state of the soul.

Degradation that retains its power is a sign of hope
The twentieth century, in its infinite revolutions and evolutions, gave us the exact perception of the perishability of the real, of a man and a world that carry within them a process of temporal and spatial decay which, however, are not signs of destruction, but represent precisely the harbingers of a new beauty, a beauty that does not fear disquiet, that does not fear contamination, that does not fear the exodus, but that makes of these instead the cornerstones of a new possible vision, permanent and impermanent, profoundly genuine and at times even harsh: the foundations for a new humanism. I quote an excerpt from a writing of mine :

"…the infinite passes through us, incarnates us, departs and returns, it is not imaginable but it is experienceable, and its experienceability is bound to what is most distant from its concept, precisely the body, the body of flesh, the body with its processes, the only possible catalyst, because only through the body, at least in this universe, are we able to perceive and generate thought, and through the body, were it even its negation, the tuning fork of our music can come into attunement with the depths of the surface that reveals and conceals itself to us constantly, in a mysterious attempt to hide its own unveiling"[3].

From these intuitions sprang the design of all the elements: the ambo, the baptismal font, the altar, the vestibule, the door and the portal.

Concrete and glass, poverty and transparency
The materials I chose are concrete, in coherence with the structure of the Church, and glass. The first thought was poverty and transparency. Then other levels of reading were added. Poverty does not mean inferiority, so much so that in the structural hierarchy of the new church there will be an altar of poor stone resting upon the marble, to signify a change in reading that makes poor materials more important than rich ones if inhabited by a strong idea that incarnates and gives them meaning. Moreover, concrete is the material with which building has been done in urban centres since the times of Rome, with an increase, not always controlled, in the second half of the last century. It is right and rigorous that in a structure conceived in a decidedly urban manner, the materials should mirror this proximity and choice. These, in extreme synthesis, are some of the reflections and images at the centre of my project concerning Santa Maria di Colle.

I conclude by warmly thanking my friend and liturgical theological consultant Fr. Vittorio Viola OFM, lecturer at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute of Sant'Anselmo in Rome and Director of the liturgical office of the Umbrian Episcopal Conference, whose considerations are a precious help in the undertaking; Mons. Pietro Ortica in his capacity as parish priest of Santa Maria di Colle; and all the friends who support the intervention. A word too for those who are opposed, because the dialectic of oppositions often draws out of everyone, and out of me in particular, the best one can give.

Notes

[1] cf. Chiara Falcone, Progetto di sistemazione del complesso parrocchiale della chiesa di Santa Maria di Colle a Perugia, Università degli Studi di Perugia – Facoltà di Ingegneria, supervisor Prof. Eng. Paolo Belardi, 2007.

[2] cf. Giuseppe Cerbini, Storia della Parrocchia di S.Maria di Colle in Perugia, Giuseppe Piria Editore, 2002. http://www.diocesi.perugia.it/parrocchie/smariadicolle

[3] cf. Raul Gabriel, Clandestino Rivista di Avanguardie poetiche ed artistiche, n.2, 2006, p. 11. http://www.raulgabriel.net/

Raul Gabriel, an Italian-Argentine artist, was born in 1966 in Ensenada (Buenos Aires). He lives and works between London, Milan and Rome. Numerous public and private exhibitions have been dedicated to Raul Gabriel. Among the most important, worth recalling are the solo show in London at the Broadbent Gallery in 2006, the solo show in Rome in 2007 at the Galleria Pino Casagrande, the exhibition and art fairs in Berlin and Miami in 2008-2009, the multiple installation at the inauguration of the Fondazione Wunderkammern in Rome at the end of 2008, and the imposing video-installation at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto in 2009.