Helmut Pizzinini, whose sculptures you already admired on the Concordia 360° panoramic trail, created another special project for the Via Artis. With “Yay! Crocuses! Hooray!” the autodidact artist from Val Badia invites us to take an ethereal walk amidst wooden crocuses, fragile flowers that are an indispensable part of South Tyrol, and reflect on the relationship between man and nature – it’s a shout-out to restore the connection between humanity and the enchanting flora all around us.
Just like the real flowers, these wooden crocuses transmit a profound sense of inner peace as well as resistance in the face of the natural elements. The 3.70 metre-high stems, which symbolise the stalks of the crocuses and derive from trees infested by the bark beetle, were cut in half in order to highlight the distinctive features left by the bug along its devastating way. Pizzinini subsequently exposed them to a burning process with fire - an apparently iconoclastic gesture that bestows the artwork with an aura of transformation and renewal, of transience and eternity.