Mario Livietti

The film was made with successive images of La Pietra’s face realised from 1938 to 1974, all continually compared with his face as was at that moment (1974). Through this sequence we have the sensation that for thirty-six years he has doggedly and slowly tried to reach some “final model” (his face in 1974).

The film, shot ‘inside and outside’ Milan’s central station, uses this particular architecture as a model for discovering that within the environment we inhabit and work in, there almost never exists a relationship between space and its use. It pinpoints the ‘detachment’ which means expressing one’s own critical attitude towards the kind of architecture that refuses to accept any ‘vital’ aspects but reduces itself to a ‘monumental structure’ that is not able to contain the dynamics of human relationships.

The film expresses the difficulties artists come up against whenever they try out ‘paths’ that are outside the ‘system’. All this is represented through this project and, therefore, through the realisation and use of a tool (Il Commutatore, 1970) with which it is possible, in successive phases, to supersede the physicality of the city and to project oneself towards the ‘void’.