L'Essenza dello Sport
For the French philosopher Thierry Paquot, the real luxuries of today are space, time and silence, undervalued and precious. L'Essenza dello Sport, an evening by Undici and Intesa Sanpaolo at STEP FuturAbility District in Milan on 29 October 2024, went looking for them in sport, where concentration depends on all three, and turned each into a room guests could walk into.
Space, Time and Silence each became a room, and a loop of living matter held the evening together on every screen.
Geography shapes sport and the emotions it produces. A sailor reads the sea, a cyclist the mountain road, a golfer the grass, a skier the snow. The Space room put guests inside those four landscapes, over a mirrored floor that carried each one on beneath their feet.
The ski slope, one of the four landscapes in the Space room.
In the Time room the screens ran through the most extraordinary records in the history of sport, from feats over in a few seconds to ones that took whole weeks.
Silence is the second before the start, when something is about to happen and nothing has yet. In the Silence room ten screens surrounded guests with athletes on the verge of moving and crowds holding still around them, slowed until that single second became something to stand inside.
Inside the Silence room.
The evening's identity was a slow loop of grey and silver matter, somewhere between a lava lamp and wet cement, catching green light: technology and nature in a single substance. It ran behind the talks and titles and between the rooms, and was designed to carry the event on Instagram too.
The loop that ran on every screen.
Credits
Client: Rivista Studio, for Undici and Intesa Sanpaolo
Scope: 3D films, sound design, video editing
With: Franco Conte, Alessandra Vuillermin, Marco Londero