NUOVO GRAND TOUR
LUCA FEDERICO FERRERO
SEASON 2025
Luca Ferrero is a product designer and artist. His artistic research operates in the unstable zone between reality and its staging. Through sculpture and installation, he produces minimal displacements that expose the artificial frameworks underlying what we perceive as natural, functional, or authentic. His works trigger conceptual short-circuits between nature and artifice, structure and surface, growth and fabrication, revealing representation as an active construction rather than a neutral reflection.
During his residency, he developed Per fare un albero ci vuole il legno (“To Make a Tree, You Need Wood”), a sculptural installation reconstructing a tree entirely from parquet slats. The trunk and branches unfold through a rigid, segmented geometry, as if organic growth had been reformatted according to industrial logic. The tree, an emblem of vitality and origin, appears here as a product: modular, repeatable, interior.
At the core of the work lies a material paradox. Parquet is wood that has already completed its transformation from living organism to standardized surface. By reassembling it into the image of a tree, he enacts a closed circuit: matter returns to its former figure, but only as simulation. What stands before the viewer is not a tree, but the idea of one—an object oscillating between archetype and mock-up, between memory and fabrication.
The installation does not attempt to restore a lost nature. Rather, it acknowledges the impossibility of doing so. Rebuilding the forest from flooring is a deliberately circular gesture, almost naïve in its logic. In this inversion, fiction becomes a strategy to approach reality, not to escape it.
Living and working at Boisbuchet sharpened his reflection. The daily proximity to the surrounding woods, together with the presence of architecture and design embedded in the landscape, made evident how nature there is never neutral, but always mediated and constructed. The rhythm of collective life, shared meals, long hours in the workshop, informal conversations formed the background condition of the work. These exchanges did not enter the installation directly, yet they shaped the way he thought through it.
“Per fare un albero ci vuole il legno proposes a condition of our time: a world in which the natural survives primarily as reconstruction, and where artifice is no longer the opposite of reality, but one of its most revealing forms.”
Photos : Manon Arrougé