There are different ways to mark public anniversaries such as the end of a war, including site specific installations and memorial events.
Italian artist Lorenzo Mariani, better known as L'orMa (The Footprint), came up instead with a rather peculiar jewelry piece to remember the end of World War I.
On 4th November 1918, 7 days before the end of the war with Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary signed the end of hostilities after the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, fought from 24th October to 3rd November 1918.
The war finished on 11th November with the Hundred Days Offensive, a series of Allied victories against Germany that had begun in August. After the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line, the Armistice of 11 November 1918 officially ended fighting on land, sea and air.
L'orMa interpreted the war using tiny handmade paper sculptures recreating battle scenes that he then locked into 23 glass baubles linked by silver and white gold.
The conflict developed as a trench warfare and the battles mainly took place at the front, where nine million soldiers died (seven million civilians also died during World War I), so Mariani mainly included in his necklace battle scenes.
While design-wise the actual piece is rather simple, since it is a classic bauble necklace, each sphere features an intricate scene starting from 1914 with the Assassionation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and finishing with the signing of the armistice in 1918, a symbol of peace.
In between there are emergency vehicles and nurses, soldiers shooting in the trenches, boats sinking and Zeppellin airships and planes flying.
The Milan-based artist and graduate of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera has been developing handmade paper artworks for quite a while.
Yet so far Mariani mainly produced medium-sized sculptures representing animals such as dogs or ostriches running (a trick that allows him to study dynamic movement), trees and chandeliers (the artist exhibited these pieces at the ArtFair in Bologna this year), while developing also sculptures incorporating paper, but mainly done with natural materials such as weeds, flowers and soil.
Mariani is obsessed with the natural/real and digital/virtual dichotomies and quite often he tries to transform a natural material into a surreal and virtual ghost, playing with shapes and silhouettes. He has indeed developed a series of small installations made with leaves that he deconstructs stripping them of their structures and that he then reconstructs, turning them into geometrical shapes such as triangles, rectangles and cubes. Rather than criticising the virtual and the digital worlds, Mariani uses them to transform and alter reality, provoking in this way the visitors to his exhibitions.
Showcased in September this year at the WopArt in Lugano, Switzerland, the "100th Anniversary of the First World War" necklace is the first wearable art piece by Mariani and hopefully it won't be the last.
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