Presentation

Many exhibition initiatives are offered by the festival: multimedia installations, video installations, exhibitions of archive material, performances and photo projections.

La Città Creativa Media Arts tedesca Karlsruhe sarà ospite speciale della prima edizione di Alberi Festival a Modena, con l’esposizione “Karlsruhe, la città-ventaglio”.

On 8 April 2025 at 5.30 p.m., in the pavilion 'Designing with trees' (Modena, via Nicolò Biondo 106) you can visit two installations of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT, one of the most important technical universities in Europe: "Treespotting'an immersive video installation on the scanning of a plane tree in Karlsruhe, and 'Close encounters'a visual and sound mapping of the city from the point of view of animals and plants.

Saturday 12 April at 9 p.m. at OvesLab, Sonitus presents 'Before the roots' Musical and visual performance by the Modena Music Centre.

Discover the festival www.alberifestival.it

Treespotting

Rereading Cesare Leonardi's 'The Architecture of Trees' with point cloud technology

This video opens a dialogue with the work of Cesare Leonardi: architect, self-taught botanist and tireless experimenter. His visionary studies revealed the hidden geometries and beauty of trees. In The architecture of trees, Leonardi has measured, drawn and analysed trees with meticulous precision, considering them not only as living organisms, but as essential elements of architectural and urban space. His work has dissolved the boundary between scientific observation and artistic exploration, driven by a deep curiosity for form, structure, colour and shadow.

Treespotting takes up Leonardi's approach with the tools of the digital age. Like him, we are guided by experimentation and a desire to understand the tree beyond its image. But instead of pen and paper, we use point cloud technology, capturing 17 million spatial points through LIDAR technology, with the aim of reconstructing the tree's volume, textures and the interaction between light and shadow. This study focuses on a single tree in Karlsruhe, examining its elevation, colours and the ephemeral patterns of its shadows, in a methodological continuity with Leonardi's work, updated with contemporary tools but animated by the same explorative and playful spirit.

Questo video rappresenta il primo passo di una serie sperimentale in corso, in cui esploriamo il potenziale della tecnologia delle nuvole di punti per ripensare il modo in cui gli alberi possono essere rappresentati, studiati e integrati nei processi progettuali. In un certo senso, stiamo immaginando i disegni botanici del futuro – dove dati e immaginazione si intrecciano per offrire nuove modalità di visione. Con ogni scansione, non ci limitiamo a documentare un albero, ma proseguiamo un dialogo iniziato decenni fa: in che modo lo studio preciso degli alberi può arricchire gli ambienti costruiti, e come le tecnologie emergenti possono trasformare il nostro rapporto con la natura?

Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo*, Manfred Jurezko, Arturo Romero Carnicero*.

The project was created to Festival Treesedition 2025, as part of the international collaboration with the Creative City Media Arts Karlsruher

*Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo docente presso KIT – Karlsruher Institut für Technologie di Karlsruhe

*Arturo Romero Carnicero Architect and postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich

archivesoleonardi