The Floor Is LAVA(PIU)
Written in occasion of the exhibition The Floor Is Lava(PIU) by Davide Mancini Zanchi
The environmental artwork will entirely occupy the floor of the laundromat, which will be covered by a painted surface. Zanchi’s intervention is inspired by a popular children’s game, usually played in domestic spaces, where players imagine parts of the floor as open to a dangerous lava abyss, and to survive, they must jump from one strategic point to another: a piece of furniture, a chair, certain pre-designated tiles, and so on.
Whether it’s a playful strategy to fight indoor boredom or a self-teaching process about danger and adventure, the game has been adapted into countless variations worldwide. Its literary origin likely dates back to 1958, when author Roald Dahl published a short story titled “The Wish,” in which a cerulean-haired, sharp-chinned boy must cross a carpet filled with black lava and venomous snakes. Many years later, in 2017, “The Floor is Lava” became a viral challenge on social media, after two English actors, Kevin Freshwater and Jahannah James, released videos where they suddenly challenged their friends, in various public places, to escape from imaginary lava, leaving the floor within five seconds.
For Davide Mancini Zanchi, this game becomes a pretext to create a large environmental canvas, measuring 4 meters by 7, where he paints the texture of volcanic material. Through this simple and imaginative act, Zanchi transforms an automated commercial space into a dangerous scenario full of threats:
“My artistic practice blossoms within the exhibition space. Because while it’s true that I’m a kind of painter — people call me a meta-painter — I prefer to be a half-painter, and it’s the relationship with space that interests me. My conception of work is timeless and doesn’t necessarily adhere to our everyday reality. There are things that strike me, which I then structure to share my questions and doubts with others (or perhaps just things I imagine)… sometimes I even like to play with them. Then I get bored and change the game, though I always play seriously!
Usually, you don’t walk on a painting. Paintings are delicate and get damaged if touched… but in this case, people doing laundry will be forced to walk on it: be careful, though, because there’s lava on the floor. On the window, there will be an image of an erupting volcano; it couldn’t be anything else, also because I am very organized and not that imaginative, so I think that the image outside will make it clear what happened inside. Right? Over time, the lava-painting-carpet will wear down, and that’s better!”
The installation will be available for a limited time due to its ephemeral and perishable nature.
The exhibition is part of the fourth season of LAVAPIU, hosted at the eponymous laundromat in the Gammarana district of Teramo, under the title Decentramento (Decentralization).
Davide Mancini Zanchi, son of his parents, was born in Urbino on June 26, 1986. In the early 2000s, he attended art school, but it was in 2004 that he started focusing on painting. He later attended the Academy of Fine Arts and, in 2014, was hosted by the DENA Foundation for a residency project in Paris. Also in 2014, he began exhibiting his work in solo and group shows. A few years later, he started collaborating with Pier Paolo Calzolari, with whom he maintains an ongoing relationship. Notable exhibitions include “Toys Are Us” at A+B Gallery in Brescia, “Da che mani vidi Zan Cin” at Otto Gallery in Bologna, “Mira il mare mà lè” at the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro, “No Diamond in the Sky” at the Pastificio Cerere Foundation in Rome, and “Coba Coba” at Megadue in Bologna. In 2020, he was awarded the Italian Council for a cultural exchange project in Uruguay, where he spent a month in residency in Montevideo. In 2022, MONOCHROMO, a monographic book published by Cura.books, was released, chronicling his artistic journey. Today, he lives and works in Acqualagna, a small town between the Adriatic Sea and the Apennine Mountains, where he continues his artistic research and teaches painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Reggio Calabria.
Celeste is a post-pandemic, pro-apocalyptic curatorial project launched in 2021 by artist Alessandro Di Massimo and Claudia Petraroli, later joined by Andrea Marinucci in 2023. Celeste was born from the desire to bring contemporary art to peripheral, precarious locations, far from major urban centers. From its inception, it has focused on sustainable exhibition formats, using a reproducible model attentive to resource circularity. With the Decentramento project, Celeste decided to intervene for the first time in a city center. The initial exhibitions for 2024/2025 will take place at the laundromat in the peripheral Gammarana district, while the final show will be held in an unused commercial space in Teramo’s historic center, creating a dual movement that reconnects the two facets of the region. In this sense, our curatorial work has intersected with the local administration’s desire to respond to the depopulation of the historic center with a cultural initiative. Specifically, the title Decentramento relates both to our political practice of “celebrating the margins” and working in the peripheries, and to the phenomenon of internal migration that followed specific events (economic crises, declining birth rates, earthquakes), shifting focus from the historic center to Teramo’s peripheral areas. This year’s curatorial program aims to bring creative energy from the periphery back to the city’s central spaces, reaffirming our intent to challenge the social and cultural boundaries that push us to experience our cities as mere spaces of consumption.
