Le montagne hanno gli occhi

The history of the NO TAV movement is the story of a community in conflict with a distant and powerful state.

It is the story of a territory already marked by heavy cementification and the loss of its natural resources, suddenly placed at the center of a major infrastructure project: the TAV, a high-speed rail line between Turin and Lyon, part of a wider European plan that has yet to be fully carried out. At its core lies a simple but forceful idea: that progress, in its inevitability, can justify any decision at any cost.

The NO TAV movement thus emerged in the early 1990s in opposition to this project, which local residents viewed as expensive, environmentally damaging, and lacking clear public benefit. Over the past thirty years, the distance between the state and the community has grown. Trials and repression, police violence and the militarisation of an entire valley have deepened a lasting sense of division in the way many residents relate to institutions.

The project follows the voiceless narrative not only of those who live in the mountains, and of the mountains themselves, but above all of the complex relationship that develops between an inhabitant and their land, between institutions and citizens, between resistance and belonging, between different forms of power. The history of the NO TAV movement thus becomes the story of a people who feel stripped of legitimacy: a mirror of a community that, sensing its right to self-determination has been taken away, generates autonomous forms of organization and decision-making in order to choose its own future.

Within this shift, the Hobbesian pact begins to fracture: that implicit agreement by which citizens delegate to the State the monopoly of force in exchange for protection. The militarization of construction sites, the legal charges, the constant presence of law enforcement all convey the image of a vertical and distant institutional power. In contrast, public assemblies, technical committees, and counter-information networks construct a diffuse form of power, rooted in the territory and grounded in direct participation.

The photographic medium enters this process as a device of listening and analysis. Frames from amateur videos, technical documents, newspaper articles, and images from protest encampments intertwine in a layered narrative: material evidence of the forces that have traversed the movement and sought to hinder it. Photography thus becomes a political act in its apparent neutrality, capable of conveying complexity without simplification and of asking, image after image, who wields power, and how that power is redefined when a community chooses not to remain silent.