10 questions for... Azzurra Galeota

The interview was given in Italian; this is our translation.

1. Who are you and what do you do?

I am Azzurra Galeota, co-founder and creative director of Pessoa Luna Park. We work on cultural innovation and creative strategies to bring forgotten city spaces back to life, through play devices, installations and interactive experiences. With a certain amount of irreverence and a passion for things that look impossible.

2. What is your relationship with the things that are designed and built?

For me designing means questioning a place and imagining what it could become. Building means putting that hypothesis to the test: giving it a shape, a material, a way of working. I am interested in objects that can change a relationship with space, that make you stop where before you only walked past in a hurry. Then, of course, imagination has to live with budgets, technique and gravity.

3. How did you meet NUGAE?

Through Francesco Belvisi, a great friend. For a long time we had been nursing the wish to do something odd, innovative and deeply urban together. Garibaldi Urban Orchestra was the right excuse: a collective, experimental piece of cultural engineering to design together, where listening to the community, digital fabrication and experimentation in public space could meet.

4. What did you think the first time you saw a 3D printed part of that size?

That imagination could take up quite a lot of room. A dream come true for someone proudly megalomaniac like me. Seeing a drawn creature become a body, a few centimetres taller than you, changes the measure of what you think you can make.

5. What was your project, or your encounter, with NUGAE? Tell it as you would tell a friend.

With Garibaldi Urban Orchestra we turned the Cavea of Piazza Garibaldi, in Naples, into an interactive orchestra for three days. We started from a question: why does this square scare us so much? We tried to explore it through listening, collecting with residents, students and volunteers the sounds of its communities and of its everyday life. Those recordings became eight families of sound, each paired with one of eight sea monsters printed by NUGAE and fitted with sensors by Nexus TLC. By touching them, the public could trigger and combine the sounds. The abyss of the Cavea became a way into the complexity of the square. The monsters invited people to get to know what at first could frighten them.

6. What surprised you most?

How the bestiary managed to hold together the imagery of the project and the way it worked. The sculptures were recognisable bodies, almost fluorescent, which raised curiosity and invited people to come closer. Listening began from that encounter: a fantastic shape became an interface and an instrument for listening to voices that were diverse and harmonious at the same time.

7. What did you expect that did not happen, or what did you not expect that did?

We expected to test the Cavea as an urban amphitheatre. What was less predictable was how it would be inhabited: people who share Piazza Garibaldi every day without really meeting found themselves playing it together. That co-presence is what I take with me. Three days do not solve the problems of a place, but they can open a concrete possibility and show its potential.

8. If you had to explain to a child why this technology is different, what would you say?

You can draw a creature that does not exist and, layer after layer, actually build it. First it lives in your imagination, then it becomes as tall, as wide and as solid as you are. You can walk around it, touch it and invent what to do with it. And the step from imagination to a finished, printed project is incredibly short.

9. What would you like to see 3D printed tomorrow?

An urban bestiary to inhabit and to play: creatures that become seats, instruments, meeting places. I would like to keep experimenting with shapes that bring a small surprise into the city and, through it, suggest a different use of public space.

10. I chose NUGAE because…

…with Francesco there had long been the wish to build something together, and with NUGAE that wish found a concrete chance to experiment. We gave shape to eight sea monsters and put them at the service of an urban listening project. A collaboration odd enough to look like us.

Find out more

• The case study of the sculptures: Sea monsters, Garibaldi Urban Orchestra
• The material they are printed in: CoreLight3D®
• The articles published on the project: Press review
• The project told on Giornale dell’Architettura, in Italian: Piazze da ascoltare: a Napoli un’orchestra urbana mostruosa
• The project by Pessoa Luna Park