Panopticon

The installation reflects on the way contemporary space is observed. A black triangle, twenty metres on each side, stands in front of a landmark palace in one of the city’s best-known squares. Its plain geometry and imposing presence break the familiar sightlines of the place and, for a time, change a landscape fixed in the city’s collective memory.

Its scale sets up a direct relationship with the human body. The geometry stops being only form and becomes a physical presence that shifts habitual references of proportion and affects how people move, orient themselves and look.

As visitors approach and walk around it, small openings in the surface invite them to look through. Each is a viewer fitted with a screen linked to surveillance cameras mounted at the top of the structure. Where the triangle had blocked the view of the square, it now returns fragmented images of the city, its buildings, passers-by and traffic, seen from unexpected angles.

The device draws on the idea of the panopticon, in which the possibility of being watched leads people to internalise surveillance and regulate their own behaviour, even with no observer in sight. In a society whose relationship with the world is increasingly mediated by cameras and screens, constantly recording and sharing, the idea takes on new weight.

Using the viewers to discover the landscape, visitors take part in a system of surveillance that may also be turned on them. The work asks how far these mechanisms have become normal in everyday life.