Description
Ignite
Genoa, Italy, 2025
by Ryan Koopmans & Alice Wexell
Set within the historic coastal district of Albaro in Genoa, Ignite reflects the enduring metamorphosis of a structure that has shifted through faith, leisure, and resilience.
Once a medieval place of worship, the building later evolved into a neoclassical villa, reimagined around 1900 with painted frescoes, sculpted ornamentation, and intricate ceiling motifs that spoke to an era of refinement and prosperity along the Ligurian coast.
Scarred by the turbulence of war and decades of change, the site was eventually repurposed as a healthcare facility, its grandeur slowly giving way to utilitarian adaptation. Layers of history remain embedded in its walls, traces of devotion, elegance, and endurance quietly coexisting within the same weathered surfaces.
During the creation of this work, Koopmans and Wexell visualized the building’s layered identity through research and on-site documentation, photographing its fragmented interior where natural light spilled across torn fabrics and fading murals. These images formed the foundation for the artwork’s digital rebirth, in which nature begins to reclaim the space through imagined growth and subtle motion.
In this re-envisioning, time and architecture converge in a suspended moment of renewal. Foliage creeps through the cracks, symbolizing both decay and endurance. Within the artwork, these layered histories emerge through the quiet return of nature, where memory and structure merge in a continuous cycle of transformation, growth, and decay.
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About The Wild Within
The Wild Within is a series of lens-based artworks by Dutch-Canadian artist Ryan Koopmans and Swedish artist Alice Wexell, exploring the delicate interplay between architecture and the natural world. Through themes of rebirth, transformation, and renewal, the artist duo reimagines historic and often abandoned spaces as living environments where nature quietly reclaims the built world.
Blending photography with advanced three-dimensional digital sculpting, Koopmans and Wexell breathe new life into architectural structures, where lush foliage winds through forgotten halls, and light glides across timeworn surfaces, creating meditations on memory and impermanence.
Drawing inspiration from the Capriccio movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, the artists merge documentary precision with digital innovation, crafting imagined worlds suspended between history and rebirth.