“For everyone, sooner or later comes the day when we lower our gaze along the pipes of the gutters and can no longer tear it from the pavement. The reverse may also occur, though it is rarer.”

– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) –

TreKm&Sette is a video created by traveling the streets of Milan that separate my home from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. The camera captures only what can be seen when looking up at the sky, while recording the sounds of the city along the way.
As Martin Schwind wrote, every landscape is like a work of art, yet far more complex: a painter paints a canvas, a poet writes a poem, but an entire people create a landscape, which becomes the deep reservoir of its culture and “bears the imprint of its spirit.” Landscapes, as documents of nature and history, are comprehensive spaces of human life, where one can “read the world” in all its complexity — factories of identity. The formation of a people is connected to its landscape, to the totality of the image of its world as grasped through contemplation.
Equally important is the sonic dimension of the landscape: it too reflects the relationship between humans and nature, and is the irreversible result of a continuous process of transformation dating back to the very origins of the territory.
With TreKm&Sette, I intended to offer an alternative perspective on the urban landscape. The viewer is confronted with two simultaneous projections: two different recordings of the same route played side by side, creating a sense of disorientation and inviting free associations of images and sounds. Buildings, trees, monuments, signs, and glimpses of sky flow across the screen. Accompanying them is the soundtrack of the living city, with its tones, vibrations, and rhythms—not heard as mere indistinct noise, but consciously listened to.
In this way, the places of everyday life reveal a new kind of fascination to the viewer: that of discovery.