Inside a former metalworks hall in Dornbirn in Austria, Davide Allieri stages 47°24’35’’N / 9°44’20’’E, a portal of segmented light and a collapsed mech in a room soaked in acidic green.
The title gives coordinates. Follow them, and they land at Kunstraum Dornbirn, a former metal foundry in the Austrian Vorarlberg whose arched double doors, peeling render, and suspended mezzanine still carry the memory of heavy industry. Inside, Davide Allieri has drawn a black-out curtain across the daylight and replaced it with one temperature of light: a saturated, almost chlorophyllic green that turns walls, floor, and air into a single emulsion. From the municipal garden outside, one step crosses from spring into an afterwards.
The room is arranged around two objects. A luminous ring, roughly three metres across, hangs at head height from the overhead rigging. Its circumference alternates frosted white tubes with translucent olive-yellow segments, producing the even pulse of a portal sign or a docking gate for something that has not yet arrived. Opposite it, splayed across the painted concrete floor, is a fibreglass creature: part mech, part insect, part carapace from a motorcycle that has not been invented yet. It does not stand. It lies on its side in articulated plates, claw-footed, cockpit cracked open, a limb extended as if reaching for a switch that is not there.
Allieri builds his sculptures as shells. Fibreglass, the artist's chosen material, lets him thin surface to the edge of dematerialisation while keeping form intact. "A solid sculpture remains an object," he has said. "An empty one contains space." The creature is hollow. So is the promise it gestures toward. Cables run everywhere and terminate nowhere, power assumed but not activated. A low-frequency drone by Francesco Peccolo settles over the floor, interrupted by metallic resonances and fragmented impulses, the way a distant machine might call across an empty valley.
What Allieri is building here is less a dystopia than a simulacrum. No catastrophe, no romantic ruin. What remains is the present after the grand narratives of modern progress stopped binding. Marc Augé's non-place, shifted into a speculative register: precisely located at 47°24’35’’N / 9°44’20’’E, yet cut loose from any clear before or after. Time stretches laterally. Orientation dissolves. The body that might have piloted the mech, opened the portal, or pulled the cable taut is absent, and only reimagined in the act of looking.
Formally, the works oscillate between machine, organism and fragment of the hall's own fabric. Allieri sources the grammar of human-operated drones and contemporary car body parts, then composes them through what he calls spatial collage into autonomous creatures that point back at a missing human. The ring could be passage, relic, or religious sign; the mech could be guardian, victim, or abandoned prototype. The exhibition deliberately withholds the answer. What it confronts the visitor with is a harder question: what does the future mean when it has lost its direction, and the memory of its own promise.
