It has the shape of a silent giant, rooted in the earth and reaching towards the sky. It is the Tree Man by Bruno Meloni, the engineer-artist from Cagliari chosen for the 2025 edition of Creativamente Roero, the artist residency project that transforms the historic villages of the Piedmont hills into laboratories of imagination and relationship.
Eleven meters and eighty-six centimeters of reinforced concrete steel lattice structure, 577 kilos of material presence. Legs as powerful as roots, arms raised like branches in search of light . And a body dressed in terracotta sheets - hundreds - hanging from strings like bells, created one by one by residents, children, passers-by: "I was there," they seem to say, "and I left my mark."
On the edge of the village of Cisterna d'Asti, close to a bare forest, the Tree Man is grafted into the landscape as if he had always been there. It was born in the name of the theme of the 2025 edition "In agriculture" and from an etymological game that Bruno Meloni explains as follows: "Humus and homo have the same root. I thought of a figure that came from the earth and soared upwards, like our own vital tension".
His is a poetic and at the same time political presence: «In this cultural climate, participating is a necessary act», he says quoting Gaber . Because in this work there is a bet on community, on shared time, on memory to be cultivated together.
Made in Elmas, Sardinia, thanks to the collaboration with the Frem Group technicians and under the supervision of the engineer Michele Pusceddu, "the Tree Man" was dismantled into three blocks and transported to Cisterna. The collector and cultural promoter Ercoli Bartoli suggested Meloni's participation in the project, in collaboration with the Bartoli Felter Foundation.
Once installed, the colossus came to life through a laboratory open to the public: the terracotta sheets were worked by hands of all ages.
As in many of his previous works – from the Giant Figures in Iron Rods in the Public Garden of Cagliari, to the Minotaurs located around the Faculty of Engineering – Meloni works with hard, construction site materials, but transforms them into expressive tools.
"Technique is just the tool to say what you imagined. Sometimes I speak with iron, sometimes with sound."
And indeed, “Tree Man” speaks. Its steel filaments vibrate in the wind with a metallic rumble, while the terracotta sings softly like a natural music box. The sculpture is also a musical instrument, a body that reacts to the environment, a contemporary totem.
It is not a closed work, nor a definitive one. The sheets will break, they will have to be replaced. And it will be up to the inhabitants of Cisterna to “dress” the Tree Man again . “It will be up to them to cultivate him,” says the artist. As one does with a plant, but also with a memory, a rite, an idea.
Creativamente Roero, curated by Patrizia Rossello, confirms itself once again this year as one of the most original experiences in the Italian artistic panorama : site-specific art, relationship with the territory, vision. And Bruno Meloni's work - imposing, fragile, sonorous - is the perfect synthesis of this poetics. An invitation to remain human. And to remind us that, deep down, we are all a bit like trees.