Under the Bamboo Tree 2022
Labirinto della Masone presents the new edition of UNDER THE BAMBOO TREE, an annual event entirely dedicated to bamboo. Two days to celebrate the virtues of this elegant, flexible and vigorous plant, which is also the beating heart of the world's largest maze.
Seventh edition
This year UNDER THE BAMBOO TREE will be developed through installations, performances and presentations that will give all curious spirits, who love and promote sustainability, beauty and art, the opportunity to discover more about bamboo.
Visitors will be greeted in the entrance courtyard by the climbing performance by Traberproduktion: the unconventional artist Georg Traber will try his hand at building a thirteen-meter-high structure composed of forty-seven thin poles knotted together by ropes. With measured slow movements, each pole will be tied to the other, going to form first the base to a tower soaring skyward. The method never changes, yet the shape of the tower is always new. Visitors will be able to follow the performer in this 4-hour endeavor and admire him as he moves nimbly and fluidly through the warp and woof maze of crossed poles held together by skillful knots. Once he reaches the top, as in an oriental meditation, the cycle is completed with deconstruction: one by one, the knots are untied and the poles brought back to the ground, the found balances abandoned in favor of new forms, in a quest for knowledge stretched toward the heavens.
The second courtyard, on the other hand, will be transformed into a real bamboo forest thanks to an installation by Vivai Michelucci, a Pistoia-based company specializing in the production and cultivation of bamboo and perennial grasses.
In fact, the Pyramid Square will welcome, in the flower beds that frame the courtyard, installations on different heights of herbaceous and bamboo plants.
Different species of bamboo will also enrich the ground floor, the ramp and entrance landing of the Pyramid, as well as the arcades of the square, recreating a real garden. A bamboo structure will be installed in the center of the square by Canya Viva, a collective founded in 2016 that proposes a sustainable and environmentally friendly construction method focused on the use of natural materials and organizes workshops throughout Italy on the construction of structures made of Bamboo and Arundo Donax. The structure presented at Under the Bamboo Tree will encompass a circular area of about 50 square meters, and will be built using a process that does not involve the use of nails or screws, but only rope and bent bamboo.
On October 15, the facility will host two presentations: Canya Viva will introduce themselves to the public and explain their innovative construction method, reporting concrete examples of the use of their structures.
The finalist projects and the winning project of Bamboo Student Contest, an annual competition dedicated to all students of the University of Bologna organized by DICAM – Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental and Materials Engineering, for the redevelopment of an area of the University through the use of a natural, sustainable and durable material such as bamboo, will also be presented.
