threeKm&seven/2008
digital video/color/sound/26'26''


For everyone, sooner or later, the day comes when we bring our gaze down along the drainpipes and we can no longer detach it from the cobblestones. (Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities)

ThreeKm&Seven has been realized in Milan, covering by foot the distance between my house and the Accademia di Brera. The camera only frames the sky, while capturing the sounds of the city along the journey. In a big city people moves frenetically, absently and seems to act upon predetermined patterns. Identity loses outline and glides into a silence made of lack of communication, while the mechanical noises overtop the urban landscape. The panorama seems to be monotonous. In reality we are no long used to see what we believe to know. I’ve been living in Milan for ten years and I realized that hardly ever we turn the eyes to the sky. In the city, most of the people walk watching their own steps, believing that the sky is always the same, obfuscated by the smog and the buildings. They look at the sky just early in the morning, before going to work, to decide if bring or not the umbrella. Every landscape, wrote Martin Schwind, is like an artwork, but much more complex: it needs a single painter or poet to do a painting or poem, but a whole nation creates a landscape that constitutes the deep “tank” of his culture and “bring the mark of his spirit”. Landscapes, documents of the nature and the history, are overall spheres of the human life. They are spaces where one can decipher the world in its complexity, factories of identity. The making of a nation is strictly connected to its landscape, namely to the whole image of its own world comprehended through the contemplation. Furthermore, the sound aspect is very important: it reflects the relationship between human being and nature and it comes irreversibly out of a continuous movement of transformation dating back to the territory’s origins. With ThreeKm&Seven I intended to provide an alternative point of view of the urban landscape. Two screenings, with two different shots of the same itinerary broadcasted simultaneously, disorientate the observer, who find himself absorbed in a free association of sounds, pictures and feelings. Buildings, trees, monuments, signs, patches of sky, all flow from the screen. The living city is the soundtrack, with its tones, vibrations and rhythms, which are no longer considered just as annoying and indistinct noises, but consciously listened. Therefore the daily places give back to the observer a new charm of discovery.