Trace Of Land / ELSE

Architects: ELSE
Area: 100 m²
Year: 2025
Photography: Gustav Willeit, ELSE, Elisa Cappellari
Lead Architects: Zhifei Xu, Zimo Zhang
Construction Team: Zhifei Xu, Zimo Zhang, Qiannan Ruan
Client: SMACH
City/Location: Rocca Pietore
Country: Italy

Created for SMACH 2025, the international open-air art biennale in the Dolomites, Trace of Land by ELSE transforms the humble hay bale into a site-specific landscape intervention. Spanning the alpine pastures of Val Badia, the work unfolds a familiar agricultural object into a continuous canopy that mirrors the undulating mountain terrain. The installation’s minimal structure, composed of rebars, steel rods, and wire mesh, supports layers of unfurled hay bound by grass ropes. As it decays naturally over time, the piece merges with its surroundings, emphasizing cycles of use, erosion, and renewal. Visitors are invited to walk beneath and alongside the canopy, engaging with a multisensory experience that bridges material, labor, and nature within the living topography of the Dolomites.

Set within the alpine meadows of Rocca Pietore, Trace of Land reinterprets a universal image of rural life. ELSE envisions the hay bale not as an object of utility but as a form of movement—rolling, unfurling, and spreading across the hillside in a rhythmic gesture. This simple transformation generates a new dialogue between landscape and labor, revealing how an artifact of industrial agriculture can become an expression of place and memory.

From a distance, the installation’s straw-like path appears as a natural continuation of mountain trails, tracing the contours of the Dolomite ridges. Up close, its woven texture and shifting geometry offer a sensorial encounter that oscillates between the natural and the artificial. The work is simultaneously familiar and strange, evoking both the process of harvest and the poetic qualities of landscape art. Through this duality, ELSE bridges agrarian tradition with contemporary environmental awareness.

The project aligns closely with SMACH 2025’s theme, la cu, the Ladin word for “whetstone.” Like the sharpening of a blade, Trace of Land refines perception—reconsidering the tools, materials, and gestures that shape human engagement with the land. By liberating the hay bale from its compacted industrial form, ELSE reclaims it as a living material capable of narrating the relationship between human effort and ecological cycles. The installation thus becomes both artifact and act, where making and unmaking occur simultaneously.

Materially, the structure embodies a philosophy of restraint and adaptability. Vertical rebars and horizontal steel rods form a skeletal frame, overlaid with wire mesh that supports the hay’s unfurled body. This lightweight composition allows the installation to rest gently on the landscape, adapting to its irregular contours without permanent intervention. The hay’s layered fibers filter sunlight and air, creating an atmosphere that feels both tactile and ephemeral—an inhabitable shade born from agricultural residue.

Within and beneath this porous canopy, visitors encounter spaces that invite pause and reflection. Rectangular hay bales arranged as seats transform the work from a visual installation into a communal environment. Here, the boundaries between function and abstraction blur, allowing the landscape itself to participate in the design. Movement through the structure parallels the rhythm of mountain pastures, guiding visitors through a choreography of sight, scent, and touch.

Over time, the installation continues its dialogue with the land through natural decay. As the hay decomposes, it returns nutrients to the soil, closing a temporal loop that reinforces ELSE’s sensitivity to ecological renewal. Trace of Land exists not as a static sculpture but as a transient presence—one that fades back into the environment from which it was drawn. Through its simplicity and impermanence, the work restores a sense of continuity between human creation and the enduring processes of nature.