OFFICINE MARCONI - the building Italcable

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Built as the Italoradio HQ in the 1920s, destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, and rebuilt thanks to the Marshall Plan, a place like the Italcable exchange in Romanina signifies a lot, first and foremost, in the past as in the present day, technology.

Few sites in Italy can boast a true link with the technological transformations of the last century. But Italcable has its own implicit technological heritage, consisting of photos of people at work, of cables, pylons, messages sent and received, connection attempts, lines that won’t connect, that get cut off, deliveries, seas crossed and mountains by-passed, a set of images portraying modernity, opening the doors to the present day.

In the remains of the past, we can make out the roots of our future: a future at the same time both more global and more local, that is, more and more glocal.

Previously a workplace with no connections with the immediate surroundings, the Italcable exchange now becomes a place where the intelligentsia pass through, where they volunteer or are even made to think about the meanings of the place where they are, mixing fun and ethics, leisure and study. The messages sent by telegraph become traces of a musical score that plays many contemporary rhythms, between extremes of urban and folk sounds.

It is this deliberate disharmony that gives a voice to a new way of making culture, joining popular and high-class drifts, looking for new memories and stability while on the move.