Each candle uses the language, colours, scents, and textual imperatives of South Tyrolean seasonal marketing. The texts echo situations and consumption rituals used to frame seasonal experiences for tourists. Operating as a Trojan Horse, the candles initially offer familiarity and pleasure, inviting users to inhabit a recognisable seasonal narrative. Through the act of lighting, and assisting to the melting however, the candle undergoes a slow, irreversible transformation: words lose legibility, layers collapse, and forms become unstable. This functions as a temporal performance that exposes the fragility of the narratives embodied in the object. The same hand that activates the candle also initiates its dissolution, mirroring human participation in altering climatic rhythms. The resulting sculptural residue materialises the collapse of seasonal certainty, prompting an uncanny awareness of the gap between ecological reality and the seasons we consume.
Melting of un-seasonal certainties
Eleonora Lunardoni
My project examines how seasonal identity in South Tyrol is increasingly constructed and stabilised through tourism marketing despite growing ecological instability. Observing the region from an external position, the project examines how climate change disrupts familiar seasonal rhythms, institutions intensify their efforts to preserve the appearance of stable seasons through curated imagery, atmospheric design, and emotionally charged narratives. Seasons thus shift from lived ecological conditions to cultural and economic products.
Rather than addressing unseasonability as an abstract condition, the project explores the tension between natural seasonality, determined by planetary rhythms, and artificial seasonality, shaped by marketing strategies and anchored in nostalgic imaginaries. South Tyrolean tourism branding maintains the illusion of stability. These dynamics are translated into a series of seasonal scented candles, chosen for their role as emotionally charged, ritualised consumer objects. Candles already function as carriers of seasonal identity within emotional marketing, making them effective critical objects for examining how seasons are commodified.
The melting and layering process on the pedestal-box.
Photo by Ludovico Colato
Showcase of the the final product.
You are holding an object that smells like a season.
Or rather, like how a season is meant to feel.
In South Tyrol, seasons are no longer only lived — they are carefully constructed, curated, and extended. Images, scents, colours, and rituals work together to preserve an idea of seasonal stability, even when ecological rhythms become increasingly unstable. These candles were conceived inside that gap. At first, they behave exactly as expected. They reassure. They decorate. They might even smell familiar. But as they burn, something shifts. The candles do not represent a season — they perform its loss. You are invited to take part in this transformation and encouraged to live a moment of discomfort — an opportunity to pause and question how seasons are experienced today, how expectations are shaped, and how deeply we participate in maintaining familiar illusions.
If something feels off, that is intentional.
If certainty melts, that is the point.
The days are getting longer, we awake the nature and we add colours to the landscape to enrich every picture. In spring, we enjoy being out and about in nature because the temperatures are increasing like crazy ideal for not knowing how to deal with them. A true experience for soul in South Tyrol .
Have you already planned your summer holidays? In South Tyrol, we offer you an incredible range of possibilities, even those we don't have. The Dolomites, the Ortler region, Mount Kronplatz or among the vineyards: the boiling sun will caress your skin and the wind will give you new energy.
Lush autumn! We paint the larch trees yellow and we even colour the paths along the Waalwege canals until we reach the mountain peaks once covered with snow. Indian summer lingers. The clear air and unusually warm temperatures will make you forget what season it is in South Tyrol.
The sun shines on perfectly groomed slopes with guaranteed artificial snow. Here in South Tyrol, winter is not just experienced, it is felt. Even when it is too warm to enjoy it, we will make sure you get the most out of it. Is it about glittering lights, the smell of cinnamon and a lot of expectations.
Lighting the candle becomes a guided performance: ”Everything” is melting. Considering the fact that they are developed as an object of consumption for individual use that sneak into users’ houses, as part of my artistic practice, everyone will experience the candles in their own way. I don’t want to force in the users any thought reather I want to trigger a moment of uncanny awareness: a sort of discomfort that opens a space for questioning the authenticity of the seasons they are experiencing/have been experiencing. To me the fact that in the end they end up with an aesthetic “melted monster” in their house, an object that occupies a space and it is present, is an invite to question the experience of it. The user participates, consciously or not, in the dissolution of their own seasonal certainty. Each candle is composed of layered scented discs representing artificial, marketed seasons, which melt and mix with the wax body representing natural seasonal rhythms. As the candle burns, colours and scents evolve over time, revealing the fragility of the (natural) seasons and of the artificial seasonal narratives caused/created by humans.
The melting and layering process on the pedestal-box.
Photo by Ludovico Colato