AfterVille. The Underground Exhibition

Since the beginning of the twentieth-century science fiction has had a field day painting the appearance of the cities of tomorrow, created to host tomorrow’s heroes and their adventures. Seemingly endless and different from one another, these imaginary metropolises in reality show common traits allowing to group them into ten standard models, classified according to their distinctive features. Based on the political regime, the aesthetic elements, the infrastructures, the communication means, the developmental processes, the role covered by technology, all the cities of the future described in science fiction can be grouped into one of these ten macro-categories which reflect the culture, the aesthetics and the design of a given historical period. "AfterVille. The Underground Exhibition" is the exhibition which showcases those ten urban models, those ten imaginary capitals. Conceived and curated by Michele Bortolami and Tommaso Del Mastro from Studio Undesign, together with Fabrizio Accatino and Massimo Teghille, AfterVille winds along an itinerary involving ten stations of the Turin Underground. All you need for visiting it is a metro ticket that you can use to move from one station to the next, thereby having the possibility of viewing all ten exhibition installations in succession. Every station is equipped with a personalized system and a display, which will show you in sequence - through a special tourist guide coming directly from 2058 - all the features of these ten imaginary cities, created by mixing cinema, cartoons, and video-clips with elements of existing cities. All this in a game of mirrors capable of surprising, entertaining and bewildering the visitor. Welcome to AfterVille, the city where tomorrow begins today. The visit to this fantastic capital, with its thousand styles, souls and faces, winds under the ground, along the route of the metro. A city created by the sum of endless science fiction imageries which dreamed it, theorized it, planned it, drawn it, shaped it from nothing. There are endless approaches and itineraries to choose from to visit AfterVille. We have identified ten of them: ten cities into the city, one for each underground station. If you want to start the trip, all you need a little more than one hour of your time and a ticket. Take the first train and get off at the next station. Position yourself in front of a screen and visit one of the ten cities which make up AfterVille. Take another train and so on, station after station. The trip starts at TotalVille and ends at ShipVille, the last station, the last city. Even if it is your first time at AfterVille, we are sure you will begin to recognise places, buildings, lights, atmospheres, faces within a few minutes. And once your visit has ended, you will feel as if you had lived there all along. http://www.afterville.com/