ELENA DAMIANI: Signal and Strata

SIGNAL AND STRATA — Carpenter Center, Harvard 

Elena Damiani

Ximena Garrido-Lecca

Ishmael Randall-Weeks

Signal and Strata is organized by

Kate McNamara, Interim John R. and

Barbara Robinson Family Director,

and Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial and

Public Programs Assistant.

Signal and Strata at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts brings together three Peruvian artists whose practices interrogate the entanglements of modernity and resource extraction. While the exhibition as a whole considers how materials such as travertine, copper, and concrete shape political, technological, and educational histories, Elena Damiani’s work stands out for its profound meditation on geological time and the material foundations of modern design.

At the heart of Damiani’s contribution is Testigos (after A. Aalto) (2023), a sculptural installation composed of thirty hand-carved travertine cylinders linked vertically by copper hinges. The work references a 1936 pinewood screen by the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto, situating Damiani’s practice in dialogue with twentieth-century design histories. This reference is particularly resonant within the Carpenter Center, designed by Le Corbusier, and historically connected to the legacy of the Bauhaus through figures such as Walter Gropius. By invoking this lineage, Damiani draws attention to the global spread of modernist aesthetics and their ideological underpinnings of progress, order, and development. Damiani’s material choices complicate this narrative. Travertine, long prized in modernist architecture for its clean surfaces and structural elegance, is also a sedimentary stone formed over millennia. Its porous surface and visible striations record slow processes of mineral deposition and filtration, making time materially present. In Testigos, these layered surfaces resist the linear temporality that modernity promotes. Rather than embodying forward movement and technological advancement, the travertine cylinders register fractured and overlapping histories embedded within the earth itself.