When the mountain stops being profitable
Across the Piedmontese Alps, 76 of Italy's 256 abandoned ski facilities stand as the material residue of a vision: the mountain as an economic resource to be maximised, infrastructured, and consumed. Bobsled tracks, ski jumps, chairlifts, and monorails — built across decades of weekend tourism and speculative investment — now deteriorate at the edges of villages, slowly absorbed by the forest they displaced.
This project listens to what that model left behind. Through field recording and acoustic ecology, it turns these ruins into instruments — revealing the slow vitality of concrete under pressure, wind through hollow architecture, water finding its way back through abandoned channels.
Extractive capitalism vs Alpine ecology
These sites are not only victims of poor management or bad luck. Many were abandoned because snow stopped coming — the Alps are among the fastest-warming regions in Europe. The ruins of ski tourism are also, therefore, direct evidence of a broader confrontation: between the logic of extraction and the reality of a living, changing ecosystem that was never simply a backdrop.
The project reads the Alpine landscape as a space of complex memory — suspended between the euphoric imaginary that built these infrastructures and the ecological transformation that unmade them. The title, borrowed from Bruno Munari's Cappuccetto Bianco, turns the white page into an invitation: to imagine what is no longer there, and to hear what quietly persists.
Cesana Torinese — Turin 2006
Cesana Torinese
Built for the Turin Games, abandoned almost immediately. Public money, permanent ruin.
Pra Gelato
Built for the 2006 Winter Olympics. Two gigantic concrete skeletons filled with broken glass.
San Sicario
Pininfarina-designed. Abandoned when maintenance costs of custom design outweighed returns.
Palit — Valchiusella
Family-run lift, almost entirely reclaimed by forest. The quiet collapse of a local economy that depended on snow.
Viù — 1450m
Two skilifts, an unsold residential complex, a hotel never completed. No snow, no buyers.
Three
modes
Spatial audio, video projection, found objects, testimonies from surrounding communities.
For acousmatic concerts, radio broadcast, and phonographic publication. Immersive and stereo versions.
Deep-mapping and web platform: sound and photographic documentation on an interactive map of all abandoned sites.
A multi-scale approach to listening
The recording setup is designed to operate across scales of audibility. Aerial microphones (Sennheiser MKH series and custom-built units) document the acoustic character of each environment at the scale of the body and the landscape. Contact microphones, piezoelectric sensors, applied directly to metal, concrete, and wood surfaces, bypass the air entirely — turning the infrastructures themselves into resonating bodies and revealing internal vibrations and sub-audible frequencies. Hydrophones probe the state transformations of water inside and around the ruins: ice, melt, flow.
The approach draws on acoustic ecology and soundscape studies while remaining in dialogue with the material tradition of musique concrète — not as a stylistic reference but as a methodological one: listening as a form of contact with matter. The sites are not treated as passive subjects of documentation but as active acoustic environments whose behaviour changes with season, temperature, and structural decay.
Impulse response recordings of the larger structures will be central to the compositional work: the acoustic signature of each space becomes both archive and compositional material, allowing the spatial character of the ruins to persist inside the installation long after the field sessions end. A further layer will be represented by the interview — that is, through interaction with local communities and the collection of testimonies, dreams, visions.
Manfredi Clemente
Sound artist and field researcher based in Turin. Practice spans installation, electroacoustic composition, and sound for theatre — consistent focus on place, ecology, and the politics of listening. PhD, University of Birmingham (2017). Professor of Electroacoustic Composition, Conservatorio A. Vivaldi, Alessandria. Founder of Almavox.
- Residency, Palazzo Butera — Ca'Foscari University 2025
- Residency, Fondazione Studio Rizoma, Palermo 2025
- Residency, Musiques&Recherches Brussels 2022 & 2023
- Residency, Châteauvallon-Liberté, Toulon 2021 & 2024
- Residency, APNÉES, Grenoble 2022 & 24
- 1st Prize, Prix Luigi Russolo 2023
- 1st Prize, Prix Presque Rien 2019
- Prix Banc d'Essai, GRM Paris 2018
Curatorial & production partners
Modular and scalable — suitable for gallery contexts, festival programming, and institutional research partnerships. Open to co-production, residency, and commission models. The work speaks to questions of ecology, extractive economies, and territorial memory that are neither local nor temporary.