Outsider Environments Europe: Fiorenzo Pilia, Il giardino fantastico/The fantastic garden

February 28, 2012

Fiorenzo Pilia, Il giardino fantastico/The fantastic garden

picture courtesy of Costruttori di Babele

This post is about a sculpture garden with very special characteristics, located in the isle of Sardinia, Italy

Life and works

The garden has been created by Fiorenzo Pilia (b. 1933). As a youngster he wouldn't enjoy much schooling and he earned his living as a farmer.

At sixty, in 1993, without any artistic training, he began making sculptures, that he would expose in an orchard of some 4000 m2 he owned. Like so many other selftaught artists he would use residual material, but a special feature of his constructs is, that he uses various contemporary materials like resin, cable waste and scrap of modern production processes.

One of the main features of the garden is a sculpture of a lying female, as in above picture, some 15 meters long, made with a basic form of chicken wire covered with a mixture of foam and glue. The inside of this sculpture, which can be entered via a door between the two legs, shows internal organs made of various wirework and cable material. The whole project, that took mr Pilias some four years to complete, represents the mystery of life.

this picture, and the next two,

courtesy of Lucia Rizzi, Picasa

However, the garden has many more creative constructs, like a tower (representing one of the former New York Twin Towers) and lifesized impersonations of grouped people.

You will also come along a strange flying machine and a "crocodile" with a tail in the form of a hand, as shown below.

Fiorenzo Pilia's fantastic garden is located some 1 km outside the Sardinian community of San Sperate, which has some fame as a "village of artists", initiated in 1968 by Italian sculptor Pinuccio Sciola.

More pictures, documentation

* Video "Il mistero dell donna" by Nodux2 (10'57", Youtube, uploaded may 2011)