THE ANTI-AIRCRAFT TUNNEL REBORN AS A WORK OF ART, FROM THE FORNACE REFUGE TO A DIGITAL REFUGE.

Laura Andreini’s, Giovanni Polazzi’s and Marco Casamonts Archea Associati studio turned an old drainage channel, which served as an air-raid shelter during WWII, into a place dedicated to exhibitions, events, and performances in the fields of digital art, architecture, photography, and literature.
The museum was officially opened on April 13, 2022, as reported by Corriere Fiorentino, in conjunction with Forma Edizioni and Tornabuoni Arte, with the site-specific work Oro by Fabrizio Plessi, one of Italy’s first video artists. To animate the 16 screens positioned throughout the tunnel coated in iridescent majolica and a blue carpet “A vast gold mosaic that breathes in its underground liquidity as it melts,” adds Plessi. The Digital Refuge is nothing more than a cutting-edge cultural crossroads that, in a city like Florence, finds the impetus to face and overlap the existing. I wanted to turn the water that I imagined flowing in this place a long time ago into gold as a good omen and as a human desire for an improvement in the existential condition, a living need, and very much felt even in our period.”

“A space where you may enter and move but also learn about and experience digital,” says architect Marco Casamonti. We want to assume that a site that was formerly thought to be a safe haven from physical aggression, such as an air-raid shelter, may be reincarnated as a space of freedom and expression, in a place of art.”

Ph credits: Pietro Savorelli & Associati, Source: Icon Magazine