Fuoripista, gres_art671, Bergamo, Italy

Arte, sport e inverno**
Gres Art 671 – Bergamo, Italy

When the exhibition Fuoripista closed its doors at the Gres Art Museum in Bergamo, it left behind more than memories of sport, snow, and movement. It left a space for reflection on what winter still is today — and what remains of it. Positioned at the intersection of art, sport, and winter landscapes, the exhibition deliberately ventured off the beaten track, sharpening attention to the cultural, political, and ecological dimensions of winter.

In dialogue with the Milano–Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, Fuoripista avoided celebration and spectacle. Instead, historical works encountered contemporary installations, archival materials met experimental formats. Sport appeared less as competition than as a cultural practice — as gesture, risk, and a projection surface for ideas of progress and control.

One of the most striking contributions was the installation Void, which addressed glacier retreat with quiet determination. A geotextile traced the silhouette of the glacier from which the material itself originated. What became visible was not ice, but its absence: an empty space anticipating the void that will remain once glaciers have completely disappeared. 

Void rejected pathos in favor of radical reduction — emptiness as form, as memory, as warning.

This visual work was accompanied by sound pieces by Swiss artist Ludwig Berger, who has been recording the sounds of melting glaciers for years. Cracking, rustling, subterranean gurgling — Berger’s field recordings made audible what normally escapes the human ear. 

In the convergence of image and sound, an immersive experiential space emerged, in which the glacier appeared not as a monumental landscape but as a fragile, dissolving body.

Fuoripista understood winter not as a romantic counter-image to modernity, but as a contested terrain — ecologically, culturally, and symbolically. The exhibition revealed how deeply winter has already become part of a past we still believe ourselves to inhabit. This was its greatest strength: not accusation, but the precise articulation of a loss that has long been underway.

After the end of Fuoripista, what remains is less an image than an echo. The echo of footsteps in snow that no longer falls. And the question of how we choose to engage with landscapes whose disappearance we can already hear.