Between 2010 and 2015, in Rome, Gio Montez transformed a fire-damaged industrial ruin into Atelier Montez, conceiving restoration not as renovation but as a methodological and artistic act. By “making solid again” what had been destroyed, Montez recognized the architecture itself as a work of art—both container and content—capable of carrying aesthetic, historical, and social meaning forward in time.
Restoration stands as a gesture of material and symbolic regeneration, in which urban recovery becomes a position on the present: a reflection on authority, continuity, and cultural responsibility within a fragile political landscape. The rebuilt space functions as a living monument of contemporaneity, devoted to artistic production, transmission, and collective memory.