by Luca Pastore
Italia, 2016, 60'
Legovideo (Torino)
“Since few years, on the entire urban area, the asphalt of the city has been replaced by vegetation. Turin is a city totally overrun with plant growth. Grass has taken the place of asphalt.
In the squares, vegetation has grown lush, the trees and fruit trees have taken over the large streets: in some areas of the city, citizens tend their vegetable gardens.
On the Turin streets, one can see barefoot passers-by, others are on horseback, and there’s the latest generation of very rapid, quiet vehicles for public transportation. The energetic needs is reduced of 60% as the sanitary costs.
In the months immediately following its definitive transformation, the city becomes one of the world’s top-ten tourist attractions.
Besides the important impact on its image and as an international attraction, all this brings about a profound positive change in the organization of urban living and the citizens’ life-styles; with Turin’s inhabitants, in perspective, establishing a new perception of the man/city/nature relationship.
New previously unknown potentialities are triggered: the neighbourhood itself with such a different reality, after a basically simple, but truly radical, revolution of the urban area, develops new economic philosophies, completely reconverting the city’s productive activities towards other venues that are far distant from its former historical industrial vocation.”
- The film’s ‘Atmosphere’ : ironic, visionary; philosophical/poetical and technological/scientific at the same time.
- The film’s Language: aesthetically deeply involving and forceful under a video-artistic profile, and unconventional from a narrative standpoint.
The film’s Ingredients: Obviously the film is a utopian tale: seeing that it’s a science-fiction documentary, it wouldn’t make sense to try forcing rigid consistency of logic.
Therefore the film has three main principles:
- ‘documentary fiction’, through envisioning Turin in the future overgrown with vegetation (and not just, as one would expect, only in its city center, but also in the suburbs, slums, industrial zones, etc.);
- the exacting documentary coherence: in analyzing and individuating solutions to problems as they come up and especially with regards to quantifying relative costs and benefits.
- the philosophical/poetic dimension entrusted to the reflections and thoughts of the various people who will be taking part in the film.
The work’s ingredients will be:
- A) ‘real’ images (computer graphics) of a ‘utopian’ city, a truly new and simple future that veers away from the usual futuristic images of a ‘metropolis’ (skyscrapers and flying vehicles): the streets are overgrown with grass, horses and mules for transposrtation have re-appeared, barefoot citizens in front of their houses, etc
- these parts will be spectacularly visual with great videoartistic impact, accompanied by music and written words.
- B) the re-telling (through the participation of the world’s greatest experts in botany, plant pathology, psychology, neurology, social criminology, economy and organization of labour, urban planning, transportation, meteorology, etc. etc.) of the genesis and execution of the project, with an extremely realistic analysis of the costs per cubic meter (and the consequent proceeds, in terms of a new economy and savings deriving from the absence of hydrocarbon -burning motor vehicles) as though the project itself has already been put into effect:
- the interventions will take place on highly technological or scientific premises.
- C) reflections and philosophical/poetic interventions on various matters tied to the man/habitat relationship, as treated by poets, philosophers, writers, artists, architects, designers and musicians of world renown.
- the images of these people will be surrealistic, with powerful computer graphics; in some cases only the glass-enclosed ‘talking heads’ are seen.
Alessandra Finarino (Computer grafica)
Ascanio Celestini, Ashok Khosla, Marco Paolini, Gunter Pauli, Carlo Petrini, Vandana Shiva, Michelangelo Pistoletto...