Fragile Surface

IED x Artribune

As of September 2022, IED has been producing covers for Artribune magazine.
Central contemporary themes such as the blurred boundaries between artistic disciplines, the contamination between art and technology, the relationship between humanity and nature, the intersection between reality and virtuality will be told through images and multimedia content created by students and alumni.
The multidisciplinary approach that has always been at the heart of IED's teaching methodology and the contents of Artribune  allow an in-depth study of the artistic and design disciplines involved in the selected works and their increasingly blurred and overlapping boundaries.
Each cover, created exclusively for Artribune,  symbolise the threshold to cross in order to immerse oneself in the depth and versatility of the project. The fragile surface to be broken in order to venture into the hyper-connected imagination of the designers.

SURFACE #4: The cover

Alte Terre

One of the images from the photographic project “Alte Terre” by Alessandro Di Lenardo and Chiara Boccardi is the fourth cover of the Fragile Surface project.
The project deals with the hyper-urbanisation of the mountains, a theme chosen by the students of the three-year Photography course at IED Torino to address Environmental sustainability and the Humanity/Nature relationship.

SURFACE #4: The project

Alte Terre

“Mass tourism invades the mountain valleys; ski resorts are increasingly equipped for every comfort; new and imposing structures slowly overtake the wilderness of forests and meadows".

Alessandro Di Lenardo, and Chiara Boccardi, students of the Photography Course at IED Torino, undertake an awareness-raising exercise linked to the phenomenon of hyper-urbanisation of the mountains, investigating the feeling of a place that is losing its authenticity, disfigured by a desire for exploitation that continually shows disrespect.

To emphasise the theme, the authors implement a digital intervention that erases but at the same time highlights structures that are excessively visible in the landscape such as poles, snow cannons, stations, pylons.

The title of the project is Alte Terre (Highlands), which draws on the use of the expression Terre Alte, which has been established for some years now to indicate mountain regions occupied and lived in by people.

The photograph used for the cover image was taken at the Artesina MondoleSki ski resort in the Province of Cuneo, Piedmont, at the foot of Mount Mondolè in the Ligurian Alps chain, on 3 December 2021.

The research path

The project is the result of a research project curated by lecturer Matteo Balduzzi that starts in the second semester of the first year and ends in the first semester of the third year with the Contemporary Methodologies and Techniques module examination.

Matteo Balduzzi is an architect by trade, as well as a curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and lecturer. He works in the field of public art and photography, mainly understood as a means of relating people, the environment, individual and collective memory.

The two students first worked individually on two different but mountain-related topics and then decided to combine their efforts for the Alte Terre project.

Find out about the details of their path and any future developments.

The lecturer Matteo Balduzzi:

During the second semester of the first year, the co-construction of the brief takes place and theoretical references are shared, students start proposing research topics and documenting themselves by means of a reference bibliography, references, inspections and personal suggestions. It is quite common that no images are produced during this first period, but that the comparison takes place on a theoretical/thematic basis.

 

 

 

 The students:

We each started working on a personal mountain-related theme, with the intention of carrying out two separate projects. During the first year, I (Alessandro Di Lenardo) carried out a project related to life in the high-altitude resorts while Chiara dealt with life in the mountain refuges. Both projects focused on the mountains but from a different point of view. The first shots were taken during the second year, as the first semester of the first year was dedicated to research and I only had the opportunity to take a few location pictures, which were useful to better understand both the subject matter and the difficulties of the work (also due to the problems with Covid).

 

The lecturer Matteo Balduzzi:

During the second semester of the first year, the co-construction of the brief takes place and theoretical references are shared, students start proposing research topics and documenting themselves by means of a reference bibliography, references, inspections and personal suggestions. It is quite common that no images are produced during this first period, but that the comparison takes place on a theoretical/thematic basis.

 

 

 

The students:

We each started working on a personal mountain-related theme, with the intention of carrying out two separate projects. During the first year, I (Alessandro Di Lenardo) carried out a project related to life in the high-altitude resorts while Chiara dealt with life in the mountain refuges. Both projects focused on the mountains but from a different point of view. The first shots were taken during the second year, as the first semester of the first year was dedicated to research and I only had the opportunity to take a few location pictures, which were useful to better understand both the subject matter and the difficulties of the work (also due to the problems with Covid).

The lecturer Matteo Balduzzi:

The first semester of the third year is devoted to working out the final details and producing a project output that can take different forms, depending on the nature of the project. Usually a printed layout, or a series of prints is produced, but there is room for a wide variety of objects, such as websites, installations, videos and more.

In the meantime, the students, empowered by the experience they have just had, start thinking about the final project of the three-year course.

 

The students:

During the third year, with the project now finalised, our paths parted again. On the one hand, I worked on the editing and on the final form of the project (a publication dummy), still making some images to complete the sequence. Meanwhile, Chiara moved to the IED office in Rome and continued to work on the project, continuing her research in the local ski facilities. At the moment we are concentrating on the last year of the course, me in Turin and Chiara in Rome; we would like to work together again in the summer season to complete the second part of the project in which we will apply the desaturation technique to new landscapes. It is possible that Chiara will use the work as the basis for her thesis project.

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