Francesco Mariotti :
Immigration

The NÖ Süd housing complex in Lindabrunn has been added to by two ambiguous forms. By day they are benches made of chrome-plated steel and glass bricks on which one can sit and have a view over Lindabrunn to the Vienna Basin. By night they are light sculptures. Each is adorned with 84 red, green and blue electronically controlled light diodes, and changes colour at pre-programmable intervals.
The erection of the Licht-Kunst-Bänke was the start of a comprehensive artistic concept entitled Immigration, which Francesco Mariotti developed on the invitation of the Verein Symposion Lindabrunn to be realised by 2012 in several phases. A colony of fireflies is to be attracted using artistic means as well as natural cultivation. Mariotti searches for symbiotic forms of coexistence between nature and technology, and creates hybrid forms comprised from both fields. He calls his artistic interventions in nature 'biotechnical art implantations'. On the one hand Mariotti explores biological processes, such as the lighting power of fireflies, on the other he invents artificial processes which he adds to naturally occuring ones, so distorting them. Accordingly, his 'hybrid gardens', which he lays out at different locations, illuminating images inserted in the landscape, light-immersed enchanted gardens of light diodes and industrially produced disposable products.
(Cornelia Offergeld)