Guided Flight with Gola Hundun: “Torre di Volo” Land Art in Sardinia

When the plants and animals take over again there will still be remnants of you, as they transform your achievements and failures organically en route to natural balance.

Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Eleonora Riab)

The evidence of this eventuality lies not only in our predilection for self-destruction but on the current existence of the 7,000 tower-fortress structures that still dot this island of Sardinia. Time and elements have not destroyed these structures built over a period of 16 centuries – long before the event of Christ’s birth. Today they are remnants, monuments of that Nuragic civilization, but are also home to birds, four legged creatures, insects, grasses, bushes, and trees.

Italian Street Artist, muralist and land artist Gola Hundun thinks of communications towers and overlays them with references of totemic massings, historical human rituals, geographical coordinates, shamanic journeys, and patterns of aviary flight. For this installation called “Torre di volo” (Flight Tower) he also is thinking about guiding birds through controlled space.

Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Eleonora Riab)

“The central element of the installation is inspired by the forms of the flight control towers of the airports,” he says, “a type of architecture that has always fascinated me and had a strong influence on my imagination both aesthetically and poetically.”

Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Eleonora Riab)

Participating in an art residency on the property of the Campidate artists residency (near Monastir), the Italian born millennial finds the support he needs to pursue his natural art-making cycle in an environment that is closest to his personal ethos.

He says that he spotted a bird of prey called a Kestrel inside the Campidarte base buildings and became inspired to imagine himself directing the flight of birds, one further degree of interaction with nature he has pursued for most of his life.

Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Eleonora Riab)

“The installation stands today on a ridge of that land, in an elevated and strategic position, generally loved by birds of prey,” he tells us.

A continuation of a personal artists’ campaign he calls ABITARE that more than contemplates his work as potential habitat, “Torre di volo” will be complete when Gola sees a winged friend entering the doorway of his central tower. He says the entire creation is based on his “desire to create a form capable of hybridizing my fascination for the ancestral totemic verticality and the desire to create a living space easily accessible to certain species and biological niches.”

“From the tower that I interpreted, I hope that in the near future the flight of a bird of prey will begin, allowing us to observe in reality the idea of flying, going and coming back and making the structure itself come alive,” he says. “The occupation of the tower by a bird is part of the idea of the installation and is indispensable for its completion.”

Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Eleonora Riab)
Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Johanna Invrea)
Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Johanna Invrea)
Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Johanna Invrea)
Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Johanna Invrea)
Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Johanna Invrea)
Gola Hundun. Torre di Volo. Campidarte Art Residency. Sardegna, Italy. May 2019. (photo © Johanna Invrea)

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