Trento Expo
Filmworks
December 06, 2003
The halls are conceived as all-encompassing environments in which the show themes are brought to life for the visitors in a highly spectacular and evocative way.
The environments are marked by five video-installations that present the issues the exhibition addresses: the deprived infrastructures, traffic congestion, high accident rates, the environmental impact and the future of transportation systems.
Traffic congestion, for instance, 1,2,3,10,100,1000 cars backed up, is represented by placing four car doors in the space. Short stories of people stuck in traffic, frozen in this absurd daily commuting routine, are projected onto the door windows.
In the video-installation Crash, inspired by the fearful accident rates, the synchronized images of the bodies of a number of actors colliding, hitting and shoving each other from one screen to the next are projected onto three large screens, metaphorically simulating a series of dramatic car accidents.
The environmental impact is the theme of the Gaia installation. In this exhibit a large metal tank full of a thick black liquid occupies most of the space. Images of night traffic constantly flowing down two tilted planes into the tank while a falling drop, its sound amplified throughout the space, shatters the images reflected on the liquid’s surface. The almost hypnotic atmosphere created by the video installation suggests the slow yet relentless increase in pollution caused by transportation.
Lastly, in An indefinite past for a future still in the making, we imagine a hypothetical museum of the future dedicated to what is by then an extinct species: the car. Here we see an archaeologist whose very fanciful reconstruction of the future provides some kind of insight into the strange relationship between man and car.