Futuropia Cities — Aqua Series

About the work

To live inside a living thing — that was always the ambition.

Medusa is the most intimately inhabited work in the Aqua series a building that has been thought from the inside out. Two great bulbous lobes rise from a base of organic root-like supports, their surfaces perforated by elliptical openings at every level: balconies, mezzanines, interior volumes layered with the casual density of a cross-section through a coral reef. This is not a building with windows. It is a building that is mostly opening a structure that has minimised wall and maximised threshold, as if its architect understood that the primary function of a building is not to enclose but to frame the relationship between inside and outside.

The structural supports at the base read as tentacles, as mangrove roots, as the legs of a deep-sea creature that has settled onto the ocean floor and decided to stay. They do not so much hold the building up as anchor it lightly, reversibly, with the suggestion that the whole thing could, if it chose, simply lift and move elsewhere.

Di Nicolantonio draws the interior volumes with exceptional care every level resolved, every opening differentiated, the hatching within each space suggesting depth, light, and habitation. This is the most architecturally detailed work in the Aqua series. A building you could actually live in. A creature you would actually want to become part of.

In the Futuropia universe, Medusa is the grand residential complex of the Aqua district the building where the citizens of Verdania choose to live when they have decided that the boundary between shelter and organism is a distinction no longer worth maintaining.

An original drawing from the Futuropia Cities — Aqua series by artist-futurist Sébastien Di Nicolantonio.

Edition Unique original — one of a kind

Signature Hand-signed by the artist

Authentication Sold with certificate of authenticity and gallery invoice

Technique Original drawing — pen on paper

Dimensions 29.7 × 42 cm — A3 format

Framing Unframed — framing available upon request