Designboom_ Paola Pivi returns with a large-scale intervention, turning an Agusta 109 helicopter upside down inside the deconsecrated Church of San Carlo in Cremona. The site-specific installation, titled A Helicopter Upside Down, transforms the 17th-century nave into an uncanny scene where motion meets stillness, and the familiar is rendered surreal. By inverting the aircraft—an object synonymous with flight and function—Pivi challenges the expectations of the viewers, creating visual tension between its imposing material presence and its newfound stillness. On view by appointment at San Carlo until June 2025, the installation continues Pivi’s exploration of the unexpected and the extraordinary in contemporary art.

The Italian artist has long experimented with subverting recognizable objects through inversion and displacement. A helicopter upside down follows in the lineage of Pivi’s previous works, including Camion (1997), a lorry flipped onto its side; Untitled (airplane) (1999), a fighter jet turned upside down for the Venice Biennale; and How I Roll (2012), a Piper Seneca rotating mid-air in a Public Art Fund installation in New York. Each piece plays with perception, humor, and scale, prompting a reconsideration of the ordinary.

In the case of A Helicopter Upside Down, the setting amplifies the disorienting effect. The baroque interiors of San Carlo—a space once imbued with ritual and transcendence—now house a machine suspended in an unfamiliar state of inertia. The dialogue between architecture and object fosters a paradox: a helicopter at rest, yet poised for movement, rendered at once tangible and surreal. Visitors navigate around the inverted aircraft, engaging with the piece in a way that shifts perspectives, inviting reflection on control, gravity, and expectation.