The two Unesco Creative Cities for Media Arts together to build the 'city of trees'. At Alberi Festival (Modena 7-13 April) an exhibition dedicated to the German city and the relationship between nature and man.
Modena-Karlsruhe. Already together among the Unesco Creative Cities for Media Arts, the Italian capital of greenery and the German 'fan city' are coming together side by side to realise a vision: 'to build the city of trees'. And this thanks to an agreement between the Municipality of Modena and the Municipality of Karlsuhe who will collaborate on Alberi Festival (Modena, 7-13 April), the first architecture festival dedicated to the idea that trees can be a model and a tool through which to investigate, design and reorganise the contemporary city.
'The choice of Karlsruhe as partner for Alberi Festival is no coincidence,' explained the Councillor for Culture of the Municipality of Modena, Andrea Bortolamasi. 'Following our nomination as Media Arts City, in fact, we have forged a privileged relationship with the German city, one of the most innovative realities in the field of digital and multimedia arts in all of Europe. But underlying this special relationship there is also another common aspect. If Modena, in fact, is the city of Cesare Leonardi and the Italian city with the highest number of trees in proportion to the population,' the councillor continued, 'Karlsruhe, also known as the 'fan city', is one of the places where an attempt has been made to create a visionary encounter between man and nature, with the desire to build a physical and tangible link with the forest. A sort of manifesto city in whose structure is made explicit that coexistence pact between man and trees that our festival intends to celebrate and develop'.
A special relationship, the one between Modena and the German city, that now takes concrete form in collaboration, with Karlsruhe that will be the special guest of the first edition of Alberi Festival, starring the exhibition "Karlsruhe, the city-fan" that will be inaugurated inside the pavilion "Progettare con gli alberi" (via Nicolò Biondo 106) on Tuesday 8 April at 5.30 p.m. On show, two installations that will offer the public a transposition, both technological and poetic, of the work investigating nature in the urban context carried out by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), one of the most important technical universities in Europe.
The first, 'Treespotting', is a video installation by Arturo Romero Carnicero and Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo that reproduces the scanning of an important plane tree located in Karlsruhe between the buildings of the Faculty of Architecture, offering viewers an immersive experience and revealing details of the tree's structure, texture and spatial context.
'Close encounters', a project by Miguel Paredes Maldonado, consists of a visual and sound mapping of Karlsruhe from the perspective of its non-human inhabitants, animals and plants, realised by means of a tiny digital device that detects visual, sound and environmental data streams outside the limits of human attention and perception. The installation highlights 'an urban field' radically inverted and complementary to that known to our senses.
Finally, in the summer, the Modenese festival will arrive in Germany for a first international edition focusing on the thought of Cesare Leonardi and the architecture of trees, with an exhibition entitled 'Trees and Solids' that will be staged from 26 June to 6 July in the halls of Fasanenschlösschen.
