Thermocene premiered through an exhibition unfolding across three locations for Gallerie d’Italia, one of Europe’s leading institutions for photography and contemporary visual culture.
The project was presented within the museum’s multimedia gallery in Piazza San Carlo and through a site-specific exhibition at the historic Antiche Ghiacciaie of Porta Palazzo, creating a dialogue between urban space, environmental research and audiovisual storytelling.
Far from representing the mountain as an untouched natural landscape, Thermocene reinterprets it as an environment shaped by invisible infrastructures and signs of human presence: fragments of radio transmissions, encrypted military codes, satellite communications and interferences, fine dust detectors, and sounds coming from the valleys.
Starting from the collected signals, composers Ferrero and Mongitore, separated by thirty kilometers and immersed in a glacial solitude, even deprived of essential services but connected through a digital signal, created a synchronized visual and sonic symphony.
Thermocene seeks to demonstrate, in a poetic and empirical way, that it is impossible to imagine a planet free from the overwhelming impact of human beings. In this context, the idea of “zero impact” reveals itself as an unattainable utopia.
Human presence exists even where it seems invisible, and awareness of a nature increasingly polluted by human devices will inevitably become central to a new understanding of freedom and survival in an era we struggle to accept: the Thermocene.
An installation exhibition by
Giorgio Ferrero, Rodolfo Mongitore (Mybosswas) & EX.
Curated by
ARTECO (Beatrice Zanelli and Camilla Zennaro)
