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merged, etc. In them, everything is covered
with water and growing plants. The vegetal
fiction is closely bound to those dreams of
living things you don’t know of, but which
can grow and invade us.
ED: In this spatial, architectural, and
sculptural negotiation, how’s the collabora-
tion with architects?
CI: I have always been very fortunate
working with architects. I always try to
build places, as you well know, so when
I work with an architect who is raising a
building with specific needs and require-
ments, I do my best to make sure that my
piece isn’t trivial. That is, that it’s not just
something pretty placed at the entrance to
a building, but something that serves a real
purpose, and also has a certain autonomy.
For example, in a work I did with Norman
Foster in London, the piece acts as a bar-
rier, protecting the building from possible
aggressions, but it functions at the same
time as a meeting point, a nexus between
one side of the project and the other, so
that the avenue has a stronger presence, or
makes more sense. In that case the rapport
with the architect was really very useful
because together we talked about creating
the pit, and about the communication and
the illusion of continuity that I wanted to
achieve in order to evoke the rivers that had
once flowed there.
ED: Rescuing the nature of cities from
what it was and that isn’t there. That is,
you imagine what it was. It’s a story tied to
both space and time.
CI: No doubt. The creation of sequences
is just another material that goes into the
making of the pieces. But so is the interest
in creating gathering places in the city.
ED: You make a sculpture in a present
time, but you simultaneously re-do a past,
and all the while, you also have to be think-
ing of a future.
CI: That’s what I have in mind a lot,
with the patinas. By this I mean not only
the superficial patinas. Think of when we
were talking about organisms that are able
to live in them, and that in so doing even
get to transform their colors or textures.
And the idea is very different from dirt. It’s
a deposit of time.
ED: Your interplays with perspectives are
highly pictorial and they have a strong cin-
ematographic component. I find this very
striking in your works, and am reminded of
paintings by Rogier van der Weyden.
CI: Yes, and they are also very sculp-
tural. Maybe Van der Weyden is the per-
fect example for the cinematographic idea
you mentioned. In his paintings, everything
happens in a theatrical space, in a box with
different perspectives or, better, different
measurements of the geometrical position
of each one of the figures, as in The Descent
from the Cross, a masterly work. I am very
interested in those perspectives which are
sometimes impossible, more Renaissance,
more classical. Earlier we were talking
about floors, and about how those floors
sometimes define you.
ED: Today, suddenly, in that entire floor of
Rogier van der Weyden, I saw Cristina Igle-
sias: the small branches, the small stones…
CI: That could well be, though I never paid
attention, but what really fascinates me is
the box, that very limited space in which so
many things happen.
