Snow Show, a project by independent curator Lance Fan, has been running since 2000. This art festival is dedicated to the development of cooperation between the fields of contemporary art and architecture. This year, artists and architects (who are pairing up to work on joint projects) created sculptures / structures of snow and ice, inspired by the landscape of the Italian Alps and the sports competitions of the Olympics.
For the first time, the event is held in such an accessible place (in 2004 it was held in Lapland), and, in connection with the Games, not only residents of Turin and enthusiasts of contemporary art could see the works of participants, but also athletes, fans and journalists from all over the world - millions of people.
Snow as a material should allow architects and artists to take a break from the usual principles of creativity and find that they have much more in common than meets the eye.
Thanks to the varied topography of the mountain resort of Sestriere near Turin, each of the seven "exhibits" of the new "Snow Show" is located in its natural surroundings, each with its own advantageous points of view. Compared to the last festival, this is a great success: in Finland, all structures were located on a flat area bounded by a frozen river.
Lebbeus Woods and artist Kiki Smith presented their project "The Mirror". They expressed the idea of reflection not only as a transfer of an image of reality, but also revealing a certain mysterious, hidden component in it through an ice surface with LEDs and a rose bush frozen into it. A snow girl looks into this lake-mirror.
Spanish sculptor Jaime Plensa and Norman Foster created a work called "Where are you?"
In it, they used the capabilities of GPS technology: thanks to it, we can find out the exact geographical coordinates of any point in space. Thus, it is possible to create a new ephemeral form of a portrait - a place or even a person tied to it. The coordinates of Sestriere, Foster's office in London and Plensa's workshop in Barcelona are printed on the snow in volume - "like a kiss on the landscape," according to the sculptor.
The result of the joint work of Arata Isozaki and Yoko Ono was the construction of the "Correctional Colony". It is a labyrinth, enclosed in a cylindrical shape, and supplemented as an explanation by Ono's poems of the early 1980s with pessimistic content.
