Angelo Mottura – Contenitori di Respiri | Containers of Breaths

Angelo Mottura – Contenitori di Respiri / Containers of Breaths.
Transparent plastic – 2000

Two states of the same breath. The first image shows the lungs inflated — taut, full, holding everything. The second shows them emptied — collapsed inward, creased, almost folded back on themselves like a sentence that has run out of words.

Angelo Mottura’s Contenitori di Respiri (Containers of Breaths) is deceptively simple: a pair of lungs, rendered in clear plastic, made to inflate and deflate. The form is anatomically faithful enough to be recognizable, clinical enough to feel detached from the body it mimics. And yet something in the transparency — the fact that you can see through the lungs, that they hold nothing but air, that the air itself is invisible — makes the work oddly intimate.

What the object contains is not breath preserved, but breath passing through. The inflation is not accumulation; the deflation is not loss. Both states are equally complete. Mottura seems less interested in the lung as organ than in the lung as vessel — something that exists only in relation to what moves through it, and that returns to near-nothingness the moment that movement stops.

The material choice is precise. Plastic does not breathe. It has no porosity, no warmth, no give beyond its engineered tolerances. Breath inside it remains entirely foreign — a temporary guest in a body that cannot absorb it. When the air leaves, the plastic remembers nothing.

There is a quiet melancholy in that. Not tragedy — the register is too cool for tragedy — but something closer to the particular sadness of containers: that they define themselves by what they don’t permanently hold.