All Photos By Gail

Artist Giulia Cenci  (born 1988, Corona, Italy) creates elaborate installations that invite viewers to question their relationship with nature. Her work features animals, plants, and human appendages cast from melted-down scrap metal, reusing found objects, agricultural tools, old machinery, and car parts. These disparate elements are then hung, suspended, or pieced together, morphing into a wild habitat, void of hierarchy.

For the High Line, Cenci presents Secondary Forest (2024), an installation,composed of biomorphic forms cast from aluminum, sprouting from a steel grid armature. Spindly tree roots hover above the ground, as though they’ve just been unearthed. Wolf heads balance a top bundles of sticks.

Masks of human faces peek between branches throughout the work, upside down and sideways, as though frozen in tumbling motion. In addition to these cast elements, the work features is salvaged tree limb, girded with metal.

This amalgamation of organic and industrial materials reflects the history of the Meatpacking District and the High Line’s role in that industry. The work’s title —  a term used in botany to describe a forest or woodland area that has regenerated through largely natural processes after human caused disturbances — encourages viewers to reconsider their own impact on and relationship to the cycle of life.

Secondary Forest, on View Through March 2025, is Located on the High Line at 24th Street.