For the inaugural edition of Paris Internationale Milano, Luca Monterastelli (Forlimpopoli, 1983) presents “La Tempesta”, a project that radicalizes his exploration of bas-relief as an urban narrative device. A series of plaster panels translates pornographic iconography related to power and submission into the formal vocabulary of rational bas-relief, supported by infrastructural devices derived from the “Synthesis” system by Ettore Sottsass, a furniture structure adopted as a standard in public administration offices.
Monterastelli intervenes in the iconography of power that Fascist architecture once entrusted to bas-relief, replacing its repertoire with a grammar of submissive bodies. The body becomes the site where authority is inscribed and displayed. The surface of the panels bears the marks of a vandalistic gesture that alters their legibility, undermining the monumental rhetoric of the relief from within.
Even the intended function of the bas-relief is dismantled: no longer a frontal monument placed high above, but an accumulation of slabs resting on functional devices. Form loses its celebratory function and presents itself as a relic of a compromised authority.
