Bolide

For some months I have been working inside an abandoned building in Rome. The structure, almost completed, was intended to be used as a hotel but was never put into operation, 144 rooms distributed in nine floors. Twice a week I sneaked in at night to stay inside until dawn of the following day. The ground floor has no access stairs, so it is necessary to climb with ropes and reach the first floor. Inside each room, I found 230 cm neon tubes. During the first phase of my project, I removed all the lights from the rooms and assembled them in a single room. The name of the project is "bolide", a term attributed to meteors entering the earth's atmosphere, and thanks to the friction with it, they light up. This is the phenomenon known as falling stars. The completed indoor installation is over 150 neon lights for a total length of almost five meters. The installation is divided into 20 neon blocks connected by magnetothermic switch, for a total of 7 lightings. The documentation of the work in spaces was made with videos and photographs. In addition to this, I planned to switch on the lights one time on the night of April 19th. The neon lights, distributed in seven blocks, will be put into operation every 30 seconds. Over a few minutes, the current overload will make the connections jump, bringing the environment back to total darkness.