Who looks skiing competitions will have noticed that athletes compete in the midst of two long blue stripes that stand out on the white snow. For some time I thought that those strips would have become some great designs on the white sheet of snow-covered mountain. So when the mayor of Sestriere Valter Marin and Donata Massobrio asked me to study a project for the city, I proposed to paint the snow.
Despite being the highest village of Italy (2035 meters above sea level) Sestriere is not an area of unspoiled nature. From the 30s onwards, the Agnelli and Nasi families
have built a modern mountain resort where before there was only a few cabin. The mountains that surround it are covered by dozens of modern ski lifts, the woods are cut from the ski slopes. However there seems to be on top of the world. The view is wonderful, silence prevails on the sounds of human activity, the snow and trees are everywhere.
I never dealt with land art, but I discovered that my project had many points in common with that art movement.
The planned obsolescence of the works entrusted to the vitality of natural agents, which makes the time, that is the main enemy of traditional art, a positive element planned from the beginning, the ecological attention to the nature, to the rhythms and order that characterize it and with which mankind is called to interact, the relationship with the landscape and the repudiation of the search for formal innovation in favor of a comparison with the shape of world; documentation entrusted exclusively to photography and video shooting; the thought that the discrete modification of the landscape is an opportunity to actively define the relationship between man and nature and between man and space.
Photosynthesis is the set of reactions during which green plants produce organic substances from carbon dioxide and water, in the presence of light. Using chlorophyll, sunlight can transform CO2 and H2O into glucose, which is essential for plant life. As a byproduct of the reaction you have 6 oxygen molecules that the plant liberates in the atmosphere. This process is clearly dominant on Earth for the production of organic compounds from inorganic substances. Furthermore, photosynthesis is the only biologically important process that can collect solar energy, from which basically depends life on Earth.
It’s great to work among the people. Skiers pass me on the side and overhead, sitting on the chairlift. I hear their comments, almost all positive. I'm always prudent in offering my designs, I try to understand people's reactions. "It 'a tree !!!!" the children scream, in fact I'm trying to draw a stylized tree 60 meters high and 30 meters wide. Thank goodness I have done many tests. The second time I put the photosynthesis formula instead of the trunk and wait to see the reactions.
In the chairlift above me pass the students of the ski school: middle school and high schoolkids, they know what it is, who does not know is asking. It 's the formula of life, I say, without that the world as we see does not exist. One man notes that I am an environmentalist; there are very few in Italy, he says. I am environmentally friendly like everyone else, we can not afford not to be, I answer.
In the chairlift above me pass the students of the ski school: middle school and high schoolkids, they know what it is, who does not know is asking. It 's the formula of life, I say, without that the world as we see does not exist. One man notes that I am an environmentalist; there are very few in Italy, he says. I am environmentally friendly like everyone else, we can not afford not to be, I answer.
