Terra Rara is an environmental art and sustainability project in Varese that transforms small WEEE (Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment) – RAEE in italian, collected from citizens into an artwork promoting the circular economy. The installation by Livia Paola Di Chiara, promoted by Ecolight in collaboration with the Municipality, reused more than 500 kg of discarded electronic materials, exhibited at Palazzo Estense until January 2026.
TerraRara can be understood as a smaller-scale version of the PALIMPSEST project, as it replicates the same overall architecture—approach, method, and process—within a more limited timeframe and scale (three months). As in PALIMPSEST, the process brought together scientific partners, the national environmental association Legambiente, the public administration, and a broad local ecosystem including cinemas, libraries, shops, local associations, sports clubs and schools – IPC Luigi Einaudi and Scuola Europea Varese. KARAKORUM acted as process curator, while the artist Livia Pala di Chiara was invited to explore the theme through an artistic and transformative perspective.
A particularly significant actor in the process was SANGALLI, the company responsible for waste collection and management in the city.
The project focused on waste collection practices, moving beyond conventional awareness-raising approaches to actively transform these practices through co-creation, participation, and direct community involvement. School students and local stakeholders were engaged in analysing the problem, designing new collection methods, and testing initiatives capable of involving the city and its citizens more actively.
As in PALIMPSEST, art was not conceived as a decorative or purely communicative element, but as a mediating tool capable of connecting scientific knowledge, institutions, citizens, and everyday practices.
Over the course of three weeks, 516 kg of materials were collected, including 110 kg of metals and rare materials recovered through recycling processes. The collection points were distributed all over the city in: Spazio Informagiovani, Biblioteca Civica, Ufficio Anagrafe Comune di Varese, Ufficio Tutela Ambientale Comune di Varese, Legambiente Varese, Fondazione Molina, Bubusettete Usato per Bambini, Infopoint Camera di Commercio Varese, Società Canottieri Varese ASD, Pallacanestro Varese, Spazio YAK, Cinema Teatro Nuovo, Hub Varese Corsi.
An additional relevant aspect of the project was the temporary reuse of abandoned private spaces—another form of “waste”—which were transformed into creative workspaces for the artist. The artwork, presented and exhibited in City Hall, was later dismantled and entirely recycled.
Perhaps the project’s most significant outcome concerns its legacy. Although TerraRara did not lead to the formal definition and implementation of a Landscape Service, it produced a concrete impact on local policies, contributing to the revision of the specifications through which the City contracts its waste collection services, with particular attention to electronic waste management.
In this sense, TerraRara functions as a micro-scale replication of PALIMPSEST: a site-specific artistic process that, starting from an environmental issue, activates learning, participation, and the real transformation of practices.
From the perspective of replicability, the ECOLIGHT consortium has already expressed interest in restarting the entire process in another Italian city and is encouraging the promotion of the initiative elsewhere.
