Statement of Record

EROS / DON PORCARO

E

EROS / DON PORCARO

E

Name registree: Don Porcaro

Title of event/s, work/s registered: “Eros,” permanent sculpture installation: Forma Viva Sculpture Symposium, 50th Anniversary

Date of start: September 13, 2011

State of completion (with dates if applicable): October 15, 2011

Materials: Croatian Marble

Measurements: 117” x 54” x 48”

Location/s (with dates if applicaple): Forma Viva Sculpture Park, Portoroz, Slovenia

Vendors/and or sponsors: various

URL: www.bbk.ac.uk/sculptureparks/by-location/europe/slovenia

Still documentation:

 

“Eros” installation view, Forma Viva Sculpture Park, Portoroz, Slovenia. October 15, 2011.

Statement:

In 2011 I was invited to be the U.S. Representative at the 50th anniversary of the Forma Viva Sculpture Symposium in Slovenia. I was one of three sculptors there, the other two were Graziano Pompili from and Italy and Jose Villa from Cuba. We spent five weeks working outdoors to create our individual sculptures, which would then be permanently installed in the Forma Viva Sculpture Park. This Park is situated on a bluff overlooking the bay of Portoroz, a small Slovenian village on the Adriatic, sandwiched between Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula 5 miles to the South and the Italian border to the North.

The title of this piece is “Eros” and was inspired by Plato’s Symposium whereby Aristophanes suggests that we were all once twice the people we are now but that our threat to the gods prompted Zeus to cut us in half. Ever since, we have wandered the earth looking for our other half in order to become whole. While the sculpture is not a literal depiction of this story, it nevertheless has a body constructed with individual parts, held aloft by four feet. The piece is also architectural in its form, similar to the Buddhist Stupa (the Sanscrit meaning of the word Stupa is literally “heap”). It was carved by myself, and my assistant Peter Duroc, a stone carver from Slovakia. The marble was quarried directly from the Kanfanar Quarries in Istria, cut into blocks at Kamen Pazen Stone mills a few miles from the quarries, and then trucked over the border to Slovenia.

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