Within the baroque setting of a deconsecrated church, Italian artist Paola Pivi has created a breathtaking installation: an inverted helicopter that questions function, perception, and the sacred. A stunning work, both literally and figuratively.
What remains of the sacred when it encounters contemporary art? In Cremona, in the Italian region of Lombardy, the church of San Carlo, a 17th-century masterpiecee A century-old space, dormant for centuries, is reinventing itself as an art space. To inaugurate this historically rich location, the San Carlo Foundation invited the artist Paola Pivi. Her site-specific installation, on display until June 29, 2025, is titled A Helicopter Upside Down, and its subject is literal: a real Agusta A109AII helicopter, turned upside down, placed in the nave as if it had fallen from the sky to freeze there, in silence.
Paola Pivi is no newcomer to this kind of work. Since the 1990s, she has explored the relationship between industrial objects, the environment, and the desacralization of everyday life. In 1997, she overturned a truck. In 1999, she presented a fighter jet at the Venice Biennale. Today, the overturned helicopter engages in a dialogue with the frescoes, gilding, and sacred spaces of San Carlo, creating a dramatic tension between monumentality, absurdity, and contemplation. The effect is striking. The military aircraft, a symbol of power and speed, becomes a meditative sculpture, vulnerable in its position of failure. The juxtaposition of this machine with the Baroque architecture prompts us to question our relationship to war, technological progress, but also the memory of places and art's capacity to reactivate them in new ways.
More than just an installation, A Helicopter Upside Down is a manifesto. A call to see differently. To slow down. To reverse our perspective. In Cremona, the project exhibited at San Carlo does not simply show art: it makes it an immersive, living experience, open to dialogue between past and present.
