La città di sotto - The City Beneath

For months, Piazza San Carlo, the drawing room of Turin, has let itself be looked at from the “inside”, and revealed the The City Beneath, where, during the day, in a hole of gigantic seize, teams of workers plugged away to build a new underground car park.
Città di Torino, the city council, expressed the intention of “presenting” this huge building site to the general public with an art installation which would convey simultaneously a poetic sense and the practical value of the project underway. Drawing on this intuition, the Municipal Viability and Transport Local Authority assigned the task of transforming the site into a scenic “machinery” to Richi Ferrero. Once the hammer drill and augers have stopped and even the last of workers has left the site, the “Città di Sotto” populates with Stone Men, uomini di pietra, in the balance between the past and the future. They are bird-headed and iron fish scales and carry luminous rocks on their heads, “jemstones” extracted from underground. Eight six-metre high light flames, spring like geysers from the bowels of the earth; luminous ladders rear up on different levels, putting the earth in communication with the sky. In this enormous “open air factory” the stone men, repeat the everyday gestures of a job thousands of workers, day after day, have carried out in Turin - the factory city by definition.
As a tribute to all those workers, a clip of a film is projected on a monolith situated in the centre of piazza San Carlo. The footage recounts the work of all those stone men working in foundries, machine shops, workshops, workings, goods hubs, on river banks. The images, realised and computer edited by Claudio Paletto, become both an art film and a documentary and aims at expressing and recounting the soul, heart and spirit of men and women who during the past years have been the driving force of the city.

Concerti per Uomini Pietra - Concerts for Stone Men created and directed by Richi Ferrero

On Sunday July 3rd, the American group Wolf Eyes opens the first of a cycle of ten concerts called, Concerti per Uomini Pietra proposed by Tax Farano, former member of band Negazione, and curator of the event’s soundtrack.
The artists perform live interpreting and using the suggestions and materials on the building site, creating for each show a unique and one-time music performance. Every Saturday night, throughout July and September, between 10 and 11 pm, the images of the “stone men” at work will fuse with the concert’s live shots. The audience, standing under the porticoes of the square, will view a completely new kind of show, different each time.
Little is the time for the event. The next morning, when the “non virtual” workers resume their work at the site, not a trace of what has happened the night before will have to be left behind.