Trento, August 2008, Piedicastello area

 

Le Gallerie are two road-tunnels 300 meters long each, slightly bent, parallel between them, located near the city center of Trento.

In 2007, thanks to the construction of new tunnels, this huge space was closed to traffic and became available to plan and set up as a memorial site.

In 2008 FilmWork produced, on behalf of Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino, the first big event inside Le Gallerie: the exhibition “1914-1918: I Trentini e la Grande Guerra, un popolo scomparso e la sua storia ritrovata” (August 19 – December 30), in collaboration with Jeffrey T. Schnapp, the curator, his Stanford Humanities Lab and Studio Terragni Architetti di Como, which installed the exhibition.

The contents were edited by Quinto Antonelli, Patrizia Marchesoni and Camillo Zadra with the scientific consulting of Giuseppe Ferrandi, Fondazione director.

The road tunnels became something like “time” tunnels, one black and the other one white.

The black tunnel is kind of a Phantasmagoria, where you literally walk through phantoms. You walk past five years of World War I, you hear voices of common people and you are surrounded by images (58 projections over the bent walls of the tunnels but also over the asphalt and over double-face pending screens).

The white tunnel is divided into three sections.

The first one features eight boxes, similar to the huts in the Towns of Wood: refugee camps.

In each of the boxes lies a memory of the war, from 1921 till the Nineties: monuments construction, museums foundation, archives development, etc etc.

The second section presents objects, pictures, collectables of the past from the common people: a collection of memories disposed over eight platforms.

The third section is dedicated to temporary exhibitions and other activities: workshops, a classrooms, and so on.

Particular importance goes to the digital workshop: five computers available to the visitors to surf Le Gallerie Second Life world, built from Stanford Humanities Lab. The virtual tunnels become in that way a key to access many contents not shown in the exhibition, but also an occasion to add other materials, propose different exhibit solutions, develop projects.