Welcome to La Tavola Celeste (The Heavenly Table). La Tavola Celeste is an interactive installation which takes its inspiration from the text “Il Grande Orologiaio/The Great Clock-maker” by Francesco Niccolini and describes a poetic journey through Astronomy, using a long table strewn with objects coming from the Kitchen World. Sentimentally tied to Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Daniel Spoerri’s tableaux, this installation reinterprets the knowledge of the sky, the weather and navigation advanced through the discoveries, the attempt, the mistakes and the men involved over a period of 400 years which affected our view of the world from 1300 to 1700. The table has always been a place of sharing, conviviality and collective rituals. In the light of this sense of awareness, The Heavenly Table is like the work top of a great chef, who, with a harmonious dance of tools and utensils, cooks time, lays the years and creates dishes so as to offer these to popular knowledge in a dimension where “knowledge” is also “tasty”.
The Heavenly Table aims at awakening the spirit of the explorer rather than that of the spectator, by stimulating a willingness to bring oneself into play rather than nourish detached observation so as to offer interaction with things based on the pleasure resulting from the wonders and displacements that the most banal ordinary life is able to offer.
La Tavola Celeste literally is a place that offers refuge to time, just like a traveller who decides to lay down under the stars – it is a tool to convince time to halt for a while and have a chat with anybody around by means of familiar objects.