In Offagna, where I was born, I transformed a stairwell into the theatre of a botanical infestation. It was the revenge of the festone, that ornament which art history has always confined to the frame and the frill, light and disengaged.
Festone grows from a tiny window and spreads until it becomes a caryatid in pigmented concrete that does not decorate the staircase but embraces and supports it. Three metres of vegetation that looks as if it were fished from the bottom of a psychedelic sea and left there, sedimented, by mistake. It is a festone that has stopped being harmless. It has stopped being a festone.
