EVOLVING EURYTHMY (1970)

“The aim of the Euritmia evoluente was to create a vision of a body suspended in mid-air that would move in a particular way, not rigid but slightly imprecise, to give an impression of vitality.” These words reveal Fogliati’s desire to infuse an object with a sense of life. As he himself explains, to obtain this effect, “the physical object in question must first lose its physical support, it must lose its weight and become wandering.” Fogliati conceived this loss of weight and emergence of vitality by exploiting the behavior of a ring acting like a gyroscope, similar to a spinning top that remains upright as long as it continues to rotate.

The ring is suspended by a thin nylon thread connected to an electric motor fixed to the ceiling. When the motor is off, gravity keeps the thread taut; the ring is still and maintains a perpendicular position relative to the floor and ceiling.

When the motor is activated, the ring begins to rotate, gradually increasing its speed. In this initial phase, the movement remains stable and the ring maintains its vertical orientation; but as the speed increases, physical principles begin to alter its behavior.

Beyond a certain threshold, the rotational speed changes the system’s equilibrium: the ring no longer rotates rigidly on itself but begins to tilt slightly, oscillating in a fluid and spontaneous manner. These undulations, initially subtle, intensify as the speed increases, generating a harmonious movement that unfolds across increasingly inclined transverse planes. The ring appears to come alive, transforming into a dancing, light, and vibrating figure that evokes a sense of spontaneous life and motion.

This phenomenon — the result of the complex interaction between rotation, gravity, and the tension of the thread — gives the ring an apparent autonomy, precisely as Fogliati envisioned: a suspended body that seems to possess its own vitality, capable of moving and evolving without fixed schemes or rhythms, from which the work takes its name, Euritmia evoluente (Evolving Eurithmia).