Gates just opened at the 2018 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and for the next two weekends, droves of festival goers will flock to the small town of Indio, California to see their favorite bands, performers (Beyoncé, anyone?)—and a host of large-scale art installations by emerging artists, designers, and architects.

One of the most anticipated pieces this year is the site-specific installation Etherea by Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi, who gained enormous popularity worldwide with his stunning wire mesh sculptures inspired by classical architecture. Even though Tresoldi has collaborated with a number of music festivals before, such as Life Is Beautiful, Roskilde, The Secret Garden Party, Eaux Claires, and DERIVE, this new Etherea installation is Tresoldi's biggest artwork to date and is also the largest of the Coachella art pieces.

Here is how Tresoldi explains Etherea: "[...] research, focused on the experiential perception of the space and the relationship with the landscape’s elements, moves ahead with a significant change of scale. The installation consists of three transparent sculptures inspired by Neoclassical and Baroque architecture, all with identical shapes but different sizes, positioned on an axis and measuring 36, 54 and 72 feet in height, respectively.

Etherea follows a growing experiential path where architecture becomes a tool and place for contemplation, a dedicated space where the sky and clouds are narrated through the language of classical architecture. Thanks to the transparent wire mesh, an optical effect made of perspectives and dimensional relationships is generated by the passage through the three sculptures and measuring scales, which either amplifies or reduces the distance between man and sky."

"If, quoting Christian Norberg-Schulz, 'the sky is as large as the space from which it is seen', then, when architecture expands itself, that same sky will appear ever more distant and the observer will feel like they are shrinking, liberating more space to contemplate the clouds.

The transparency of the Absent Matter, unique to [Tresoldi’s] poetics and expressed through the wire mesh filters, influences, and incorporates the space. The empty architectures of Etherea breathe  through the clouds and the wind, permeated with California’s endless landscapes."

"Ironically the installation plays on the dualism between the pure and the filtered experiences that intertwine with one another, to eventually leave the man at the center of it all. With the passage from a macro-reality to a restricted one, the human body becomes a key to read, discover, measure and experience reality, just like architecture itself. An analogy between man, architecture and their surrounding is ultimately established.

Linked to the recreational side of the festival and specifically designed for a continuous interaction with the audience, Etherea is an ephemeral public artwork within Coachella’s large temporary city. It is the ideal dimension for [Tresoldi] to continue his sculptural narration of the ephemeral as a long-awaited suspended reality, as an entity that transforms all of its elements into an event, resulting in a public space that disappears once the event itself is over.

As a temporary place, Coachella’s festival finds its embodiment in Etherea, an artwork designed around the idea of the highest expression of the transient, the clouds, authors of passing architectures that transfer the majestic sky into ephemeral domes."