Turin Dynamic City: history and art of the city projected in San Carlo Square

A videomapping in Turin ’s Piazza San Carlo to learn about the city’s art and history. Scheduled to run from December 23, 2022 to January 8, 2023 is the first edition of the Torino Città Dinamica project, which takes place in the square that symbolizes the rigorous elegance of Savoy. Torino Città Din amica takes the form of a narrative video journey projected onto the facades of the buildings on the west side, to show about 70 images of pictorial, graphic and photographic works preserved in some of the city’s museum collections.

TorinoCittà Dinamica is a project of the City of Turin carried out by Fondazione per la Cultura Torino and 24 ORE Cultura, main partner Intesa Sanpaolo, with the support of Fondazione CRT, in collaboration with Fondazione Torino Musei, GAM, Palazzo Madama, Fondazione De Fornaris, Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento, Gallerie d’Italia - Torino and Fondazione Contrada Torino: the aim is to promote Turin culture in an innovative and sustainable way. The images will be projected onto the surfaces of the buildings, obtaining spectacular visual effects to emotionally engage the viewer. The videomapping sees the direction and art direction of Karmachina(www.karmachina.it), and is composed of a prologue and three acts and ideally follows the process of transformation of the city of Turin by telling through images the transition from aristocratic to technical society. The script and content design are by Giuliano Corti, video postproduction and compositing by Francesca Macciò and Filippo Marta, and finally Music and sound design are by Alberto Modignani.

The prologue (The Square and Independence) opens with images of the very place where the videomapping is visible: Piazza San Carlo. On the facade are projected the architecture painted by Giovanni Michele Graneri, a painter of genre scenes, capable of restoring the climate of an entire era with a lively and vernacular flavor of an eighteenth-century popular and at the same time aristocratic. The square, which since the mid-seventeenth century has been de facto ’the drawing room of Turin,’ can be recognized in the details of Carlo di Castellamonte’s architecture, conceived as a ’baroque stall,’ a magical place in which life is mirrored and represented. The tale continues on the battlefields where the Unification of Italy was made by anonymous soldiers and ’fathers of the Fatherland,’ in the years of the Risorgimento epic, heroes whom the artists have portrayed following the canons of an aesthetic linked to the foundation myth, soldiers and condottieri, politicians and generals, nobles and commoners in whose faces one can read the pride of the enterprise.

The first act(The Human Form and the Face) opens with a gallery of portraits from the second half of the 19th century preserved at the GAM in Turin. Investigating the transformation and mutations that took place in the eye and mind of the painters, in this act we see how the faces depicted become, progressively, more expressive by slowly eluding the canons of pictorial realism. The comparison can be seen through Mario Gabinio’s photographic portraits from the Photographic Archive of the Fondazione Torino Musei, which nicely highlight a passing of the baton, from the portrait that interprets the gaze to the camera lens that captures the real in a shot. The rupture of the code of representation is now clear and irremediable, and Futurism interprets its spirit. The second act(Forms in Motion) showcases the works and authors of Futurism and, in particular, the Turin season (1920s), which is expressed through a more playful aesthetic than the previous one. Forms and colors are no longer the hammer with which to break perception, but rather respond to a combinatorial play of geometries and colors. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the current, is depicted by Enrico Prampolini according to the canons of the aesthetics proclaimed and propagated in the Futurist Arts Manifestos where graphic and typographic sign concur in the affirmation of a disruptive idea of progress. Finally, in the third act (Polyphonic Abstractionism) the relationships between colors, forms and depth of the perceptual field give rise to polyphonic compositions of lines, surfaces and colors. The works of Giacomo Balla perfectly represent this great artistic trend and are intended to provide the ideal cue for the epilogue of a show conceived as a path that looks at the past through the eyes of an artistic and technological present.

For Torino Città Dinamica, thePhotographic Archives of the Fondazione Torino Musei selected and provided 238 images that are divided into 159 reproductions of works from the GAM and the Fondazione De Fornaris, 76 shots from historical funds, and 3 photographs of works from Palazzo Madama. Following careful research, 53 images have been used for the final version of the videomapping and for the in-depth features that will be available on totems in Piazza San Carlo. On the other hand, thirteen paintings preserved at the National Museum of the Risorgimento (some of which are on deposit thanks to an agreement with GAM - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino) are visible in the projections in Piazza San Carlo. The Battle of Guastalla by Jan Peeter Verdussen (1743-1745), on the other hand, comes from the artistic heritage of Intesa Sanpaolo and is on display at the Gallerie d’Italia - Turin, while the remaining images from period magazines and posters.

"The Dynamic City project," says Stefano Lo Russo, mayor of Turin, “represents an ideal meeting point between culture and innovation. Citizens and tourists will be taken on a virtual tour of the city’s museum collections. Through the technique of videomapping, art content will be projected enriched by the element of animation capable of telling the story of our artistic heritage in an unprecedented journey of images, colors and sounds.”

“The goal that 24 ORE Cultura,” says CEO Federico Silvestri, “has set out to achieve with this videomapping project is to ’extrovert’ art, from the wall of a museum to the wall of a square, the symbol par excellence of city life. And this is possible thanks to the universal language of images, of beauty; a language that reaches everyone, without the need for the mediation of words.”

Turin Dynamic City: history and art of the city projected in San Carlo Square

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