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.

The following project intends to provide a picture of what life looks like and how it is perceived in critical territories in which power struggles animate every aspect of existence. Val di Susa is such a place: a place traversed for over thirty year by conflict and compromise, by struggle and victories, by violence and peace. The long-lasting construction sites of the TAV, a high-speed line connecting Lyon and Turin, brilliantly expose and represent what power means and how it is deployed against local communities. Trials and repression, police violence, and the militarization of an entire valley fueling a lasting sense of fracture in the way many residents relate to institutions; distance between the state and the community that grows. The valley thus becomes the epitome of a cultural island—socially secluded but weirdly yearned for by every institutional power that sets foot in the land.

Val di Susa’s true political power is thus exactly like an archipelago: a communal and collective power made up of small, singular communities and different politically and socially oriented groups that continuously challenge the centralized power of the State. In an archipelago, the space between islands is not an empty void; the sea that binds these distinct groups together is their shared, enduring struggle, a profound connection to the valley's ecology, and a collective memory of resistance. In this relation, the State acts as a distant and enormous mainland: isolated, monolithic, yet present in every sight.

Thus, the aim of institutional power becomes one of separation and isolation, while the grassroots struggle of the NO TAV becomes one of community and cohesion. It is a decades-long resistance against a society otherwise focused on individuality, on top-down decisions and forms of power; a system in which everyone is treated as separate selves so as to disband every and each archipelago that could challenge the great continent by coming into existence.