Gentro [2022]
Audiovisual project focusing on gentrification and touristification in Florence’s historic center.
Gentro is an audiovisual project that seeks to highlight the state of Florence’s historic centre, which has been weighed down by years of increasingly rampant gentrification and touristification.
Over the course of nine minutes, dozens of images of the historic centre follow one another relentlessly, frenetic and unceasing – just like the model of tourism being promoted in Florence. The only breaks come from images of old shops that still resist the new model of the city and from seemingly unspoilt glimpses.
The audio, consisting of three songs featuring Florence as the protagonist, sounds distorted, precisely to represent the distorted reality that years of gentrification and touristification have created. Here too, however, during the images of the old shops and the glimpses, the songs play normally. The video also aims to highlight the contrast between the old and the advancing new: using footage shot with a camera from twenty years ago, it depicts a city that has been completely transformed over the past twenty years and is profoundly different from what it was in the early 2000s.
The composition concludes, before some final statistics, with an image of the arch in Piazza della Repubblica, built during the ‘Florence Capital’ period as part of one of the city’s earliest gentrification processes, bearing the inscription: ‘The ancient city centre, restored to new life from centuries of squalor’.
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Pietro Trallori 