Ephemeral light object
Title:“Crash Hill 611″
Years: 2018
Material: carbonized tree trunk, brass tube, opal sphere, small particles of galaxies and various electrical components.
Project: Molto Molto Fuori – Object and process
Thanks: Studio La Cube
Photo: Nicolas Chiaravalloti

On January 29, 1986, a UFO described as a luminous sphere, crashed on the Izvestkovaya mountain, also called “Hill 611”, near the city of Dalnegorsk in the former Soviet Union. On the site were found a burnt tree trunk and debris containing metal particles.
This debris contained very thin and fine filaments (17 micrometers) and each of the threads was composed of even thinner fibers braided with very fine gold threads.

The description of this real event might seem to be the basis of the generative process of this luminous object, but, even if it may seem strange, it is not like that.

I heard about this story only after realizing the object. When I showed the object to my parents, the first thing they told me was that it reminded them this 80s event. The fact has aroused much curiosity and the media have talked about it a lot, indicating it as the “Roswell” of the Soviet Union.

From this, the following question arises: can we imagine an inverse process of design, in which the meaning and the references associated with the object emerge after its creation?
We are used to thinking about the design process as something that develops from the research of references and “stories” through which, in a casual way, the “form” is finally reached.

It is obvious that the design process originates from something more intimate and “emotional” where visualizations of shapes, contrasts or pure composition are born from the observation of a material and its characteristics or of a specific object. Then this is associated with a meaning and a specific “function”. In the case of this object, its function is to illuminate a space.

Maybe at the base of this there is, on the one hand, the mass media process of bringing everything to an imaginary of references and stories that are in the collective memory of people, and on the other, the process of nature, of the seed that it transforms into a tree and that later ends up being burned in a dichotomy between life and death. Clear poetic observation of a trunk that succumbs to a natural process of ephemeral consumption.

In this reflection, then, what will the process that this object has generated?