Quel événement imprévisible
Quel événement imprévisible (2017)
video, 4K, 13'
produced by Alcotra (Fr), a.titolo
The Mont Dauphine fort was built ex nihilo by the architect Vauban starting from 1693 in order to prevent invasions from Italy by the Savoy troops. It stands on the plain known as «of a thousand winds», at an altitude of 1050 meters, in the center of an expanse of mountains between the two former Italian-French borders and at the confluence of Guil and Durance. Mont Dauphin forms the archetype of the mountain fort, with its arsenal, powder stores, barracks and church. Its peculiarity, on which the work is based, is that the fort was not used over the years for war purposes. It happens, in fact, that with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 France abandons Piedmont and the border moves away to the east, making Briancon the first border town. Mont-Dauphin never knew war until 1940, about 250 years after its construction, when an Italian bomb dropped from above by mistake destroys one of the wings of the two arsenals. Its purpose as architecture has always remained conceptual and on paper, effectively becoming a utopian construction, devoid of the purpose for which it was created.
My desire through the work is to pay attention - through a video of pure observation that follows the parameters of the cinema of reality - on the utopian architecture of the fort and its failure to use it for war purposes, a subject in my opinion capable of raising multiple issues around different themes: the fickle concept of frontier, the change over time of the war practice, the intellect of the civil genius that confronts nature. From this first reflective point on utopian architecture that includes and dissects the nature / structure dualism and the correlated reflection of the relationship between human intellect and space, I would like to focus on the structure / man dualism through the theme of waiting that involved the fort with the Treaty of Utrech and the loss of its usability for war purposes - spontaneously the fundamental theme of a central novel in the history of Italian literature, Dino Buzzati's The Desert of the Tartars -.
Exhibitions/Screenings
2015 Cantieri D’Arte, Decostructing Reality Viterbo curated by Marco Trulli; OCAT – Glitch, Shangai, curated by Davide Giannella.
2014 I sentieri nascosti sono pieni di visioni addormentate – Cesac curated by a.titolo; Premio Celeste Prize, Assab One, Milano, Lorenzo Benedetti; Glitch – PAC, Milano, curated by Davide Giannella.
Webisite: https://www.atitolo.it/project/acteurs-transculturels/
