Non si era mai vista tanta neve
What remains when the mountain stops being profitable? A sonic inquiry into abandoned winter sports infrastructure as ruins of extractive capitalism and involuntary monuments to Alpine ecological transformation.
facilities in Italy
alone
tourism
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 direct evidence of a broader confrontation: between the logic of extraction and the reality of a living, changing ecosystem.
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.
A multi-scale approach to listening
The recording setup operates across scales of audibility. Aerial microphones document the acoustic character of each environment at the scale of the body and the landscape. Contact microphones and piezoelectric sensors applied directly to metal, concrete, and wood bypass the air entirely — turning the infrastructures themselves into resonating bodies.
Impulse response recordings of the larger structures become both archive and compositional material, allowing the spatial character of the ruins to persist inside the installation long after the field sessions end.
5 locations — Piedmont
Three modes
Curatorial & production partners
Modular and scalable — suitable for gallery contexts, festival programming, and institutional research partnerships. Open to co-production, residency, and commission models.