Third Garden (2016) is a park stretching over ten thousand square metres of land along the west bank of the Arno River. A green area that was finally returned to the city that can be explored by walking along the many trails drawn amidst the spontaneous vegetation; in memory of the ancient orti dei semplici (botanical gardens). The word “third” brings to mind Gilles Clément’s third landscape, which reminds us that spontaneous vegetation is an extraordinary reserve of biodiversity and evolutionary potential. The park, which can be seen here in an aerial photograph taken by Gabriele Galimberti, can be accessed from Piazza Poggi.

The Stones Stories (2018) site-specific installation stems from the encounters with the people living in the borough of San Francesco (Pelago) and their recollections of the Sieve River: in their imagery, as we hear from the interviews, the river has always been seen from within, in constant touch with water. That is why the new passage of the river fr

Confluent Encounters (2018) is an original project conceived in partnership with Fondazione Studio Marangoni. Toscano’s interest focused on the relationship between the fluvial and urban landscapes in the area of San Francesco (Pelago) and Pontassieve, where the Sieve and Arno waterways merge and anonymous anthropogenic details distinguish the scenery. The images, often captured vertically, result in a core sampling of the stratification of the territory and, once hung from the walls of the buildings of the Le Murate Complex, bring to mind the multifaceted relationship between architecture and nature.

Path of awareness (2018) was conceived by Berlin artist Katrinem during an artistic residency in Montelupo Fiorentino in collaboration with Tempo Reale. It is a path of mindfulness that explores the individual and personal experience of walking in an open space, paying special attention to the interaction between the sound event connected with the presence of our body (footsteps) and the soundscape (the sound of the surrounding environment): a soundtrack stroll on the interaction between human presence and the landscape around the river. Katrinem’s stroll, measuring the surrounding environment through the presence and the sound of her footsteps, is proposed here in the excerpt shot in the hard regime prison, which was a place of civilian su ering and deprivation of freedom of thought and movement during the years of the antifascist Resistance fight.

40,000 nails (2018) permanently marks the second cell on the third floor of the Le Murate Complex after the long work carried out on commission by the RIVA Project for the QUI solo show (2018). The wall, meant as a geographical map of a iction, took shape gradually, as the work progressed and as the wall reacted, collapsing under the blows of the hammer and the wounds caused by the nails. In this place of seclusion and, at a later stage, of confinement, Masi wanted to reproduce the forced bond of the persons living in those cells, the prisoners of those hostile walls that were anyway the only element of the outer world the convicts could deal with. Hence the contraposition with the river, which is instead in constant flow, whose waters never inhabit the same place.

Traces on the Territory includes two series of Polaroid photographs, taken during the author’s artist residency at MAD for the RIVA Project in 2018.
On display here is a significant selection of both cycles, devoted to the Le Murate Complex and the Arno River, respectively. These works – one in colour and one in black and white – unite the two places not only from a conceptual but also from a stylistic point of view.

The Polaroid series, which Masi has produced since the seventies, testify to the artist’s obsessive attention to the sign. In the close-ups, the gaze dissolves the context, focusing solely on the traces, be it human or natural prints, crystallised by the photograph that relays ciphered tales, iconic and precious sequences that embody the deep folds of these places.