THE THIRD PLACE

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CATERINA DONDI

Busto Arsizio | 1998

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Church of San Giovanni Battista

The third place built inside the monastery of St. John the Baptist, develops from a "residual" space (term used by Gilles Clément), that is, a place previously exploited by man, then abandoned and subsequently rediscovered.

The third place is therefore a space that does not want to overwhelm the previous two but to insert itself in a discourse that has already begun; a resumption of the work of the craftsmen who built the churches, now continued in the respect of how it is 

self-preserved over time.

In the years of neglect, the church has changed, building a sort of personalized ecosystem inside. 

The intervention is delicate in its positioning in the church; the sculptural interventions are mimetic, they insert and repeat the texture of two elements of the Monastery: the floor and the entrance. The sculptures emerge from the surfaces of the church, in a game between extrusion (showing oneself) and mimesis (hiding).