Una Tigre per Torino

The first part of this analysis is Una tigre per Torino (2002), a project through which Vitone creates an unexpected connection between the location of his project, a square placed in front of Mirafiori, and Emilio Salgari, the author of the series of fantasy novels “The Pirates of Malaysia” who spent most of his life in the city of Turin. The work, an installation crossed by the tram lines that recreated a desert landscape washed by the sea, with a reproduction of the small island of Mompracen, the legendary hideout of Sandokan, was intended to be a tribute to the great writer but at the same time a stage hosting an overlapping of narrative levels between the everyday and ordinary life of people passing by and the adventures and literarily landscapes of the novel.

For its almost “surrealistic” charge, the project represents an important moment in Vitone’s work, since the artist never dared to imagine the construction, or rather the re-construction, of a set, of a whole landscape taken directly from a novel and then false (or fictional) by definition. After all, it is possible to see in this project a connection with the reflection on the nature of places and the metaphorical “windows” that the people who lived them can open on these contexts, trompe l’œil on different worlds, beyond the reassuring routine of everyday life represented in the work Usuale (1995), a video recording of the route from home to work that the artist covers everyday.

Luca Vitone, Usuale, 1995, stil da video, courtesy dell'artista; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin; Galleria Pinksummer, Genova; Galerie Michel Rein, Paris