Earthtime 1.26 Milan, Italy, 2022

DESCRIPTION

Janet Echelman's Earthtime sculpture series heightens our awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and our physical planet.

Earthtime 1.26 Milan was installed in the city’s Biblioteca degli Alberi (BAM) park in September 2022. The sculpture celebrates the interconnection of sky and earth, flexibility and strength, humans and our physical world, bridging opposites with bold colors and soft curves that flow between its surroundings of contemporary architecture.

The sculpture serves as a symbol of interconnectedness, composed of countless intertwined fibers. Each time a single knot moves in the wind, the location of every other knot in the sculpture’s surface is changed in an ever unfolding dance of human-made creation with the forces of nature beyond our control.

To create the sculptural form, Echelman works with teams both inside and outside her studio. These include architects, designers, and model-makers in the studio, as well as an external team of aeronautical and structural engineers, computer scientists, lighting designers, landscape architects, and a fabrication team.

Inside Echelman’s studio, the physical form of Earthtime 1.26 Milan was digitally modeled with inspiration from a scientific data set describing a single geological occurrence -- an earthquake and tsunami in Chile in 2010 -- which caused ripple effects around the globe and even sped up the earth's daily rotation. The number in the title refers to a measurement of time, as the earth’s day was shortened by 1.26 microseconds.

Sculpture fabrication begins with braiding custom engineered fibers which are fifteen times stronger than steel by weight. These custom-colored twines are knotted both by loom and by hand, and every rope is spliced using centuries-old craft techniques. Connecting the past with the present, the artwork takes ancient methods to a new urban scale.

To date, the Earthtime 1.26 sculpture has been installed in 16 cities on 5 continents: Denver, Colorado (2010), Sydney, Australia (2011), Amsterdam, Netherlands (2013), Singapore (2014), Montreal, Canada (2015, 2016, 2017), Prague, Czech Republic (2015), Durham, UK (2015), Santiago, Chile (2016), Shanghai, China (2017), Chiayi, Taiwan (2018), Hong Kong, China (2018), Geneva, Switzerland (2020), Munich, Germany (2021), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2021), Milan, Italy (2022), and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (2023).

MATERIALS AND SIZE

Fiber, Buildings and Sky combined with Colored Lighting. Fibers are braided with nylon and UHMWPE (Ultra high molecular weight polyethylene)
Dimensions of net: 117’ length x 102’ width x 20’ depth

CREDITS

Artist: Janet Echelman
Studio Echelman Project Manager: Melissa Henry
Studio Echelman Design Team: Daniel Smith, Adam Burke
Sculpture Design Engineer: SOM San Francisco: Alessandro Beghini, Nicole Wang
Client: Presented by the City of Milan with sponsorship by Sky Italia
Project Management: US UP Production
Lighting & Installation: KIF Italia
General Management: Giuliano Gasparotti
Artistic Direction: Francesco Mazzei
Production Manager: Pasquale Pio de Simone
Engineering Direction: Renzo Maria Guidi
Lighting direction: Daniele Davino
Light Designers: Adriano Sansone and Ilaria Pizzochero
Sound Designer: Furio Valitutti
Photography: Janet Echelman, Sky Italia

LOCATION

Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano (BAM) park, Milan, Italy