'The Open' mask makes you smell sod and listen to your own heavy breathing
Los Angeles has a lot of things, but primary among them all is concrete. On that expansive slab you'll find many shattered dreams but few blades of grass, so perhaps that's what drove Mattia Casalegno to create The Open. It's a mask that provides a unique combination of grass and headphones, two things found in any LA recording studio but used here in a very different way. The Open mask presents a hunk of sod that gets placed across the wearer's face. A microphone picks up their breathing and, after a 1.5 second delay, plays that sound back through the headphones. The idea is... well, let's just let Mattia explain it:
The work plays with the Deleuzian notion of "ritornell" (refrain), and about the quality of sound to define a territory. The space defined by the sound of breathing is in a state of costant [sp] imbalance between the physical act and its sensory perception and traces an unstable relationship with the intimate environment the garment reproduces.
So, yeah. Grass and headphones. Peace and love.
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