Turin, Italy
Mission Title: Afterville
Mission By: Valerio Sacchetto, Enrico Cammarata
Mission Finished on Date: 02-07-2008
SCRIPT
- Visit Turin and check out the Afterville underground exhibition.
- Show the metro's futuristic details – if any – and the way the exhibition setting affects the stations and relates to people. Interview someone about the hypothetical cities shown and ask them what they think about them.
- Be at the railway workshop for Starchitecture night and tape the atmosphere. Does the old building help you sense a time overlapping? Interview someone from the audience about it.
- After watching the short movie in the former OGR, have an interview with the directors Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro.
- During the time you spend in Turin, try and show old and new buildings, capturing the future
- oriented side of the city.
TRAVEL BAG
What are the cities of today and tomorrow like?
These days the future can be pretty stressful, but if you don't bother thinking about the pension system, you can still spice up your spare time with some nice sci-fi. The late years have been pretty fruitful in terms of futuristic flicks at the movies and there's no utopia or dystopia too good or bad for 3D designers to imagine. As sci-fi visions quickly dominate our imagination, they seem to make the progress all that slower. Being chosen as 2008 World Design Capital, Turin is one of the Italian cities most representing urban change right now, as the many architecture and design-related events livening up the town this year testify.
During the span of a year, Afterville will pass through sundry media trying to capture the future of cities, from tabloid to video, from exhibitions to readings. One of its most interesting form is the underground exhibition, consisting of ten video screens placed each in a metro station and portraying ten different hypothetical future cities, from the nuclear winter wasteland to the corporate monster. If this might sound a little too cold, Afterville's Starchitecture night is a little more exciting. In the former railway workshop's frame, visitors will enjoy the screening of a short movie, set in Turin 50 years from now, and a sci-fi video montage meshing with a live soundtrack. Our visions of the future say less about the future and more about our hopes and fears, where we wish to go, while where we actually go is entirely different. 1984? Space Odyssey 2001? Both have passed quietly without hitting their marks, but what are our visions today?
Mission Report
The Future. When this word comes to my mind I think about everything but Turin. I think about Tokyo, robots and flying cars. Nevertheless in my very own city, in these last days a bunch or architects from all over the world have been trying to figure out how our cities will look like in the future. As in the 30s the New York exhibition "Futurama," so in 2008 Turin's "Afterville" tries to show us several possible scenarios. One thinks about future, and not really about Turin, but I have to admit that this is the best city to mix its past with its present and with the changes to come as well. I felt it in people involved, interested, enterprising and willing to give their opinion. I feel it in the city which, as a flow, reorganize its particles to fit the newness without changing its essence: it did many times in the past, and it will happen again. In the meanwhile, I'm still here, waiting for my flying car.
Valerio Sacchetto, Enrico Cammarata
