Every year, during the winter season, the City of Turin transforms into an open-air laboratory of light installations created by renowned Italian and international artists. Luci d’Artista was born in 1998 as an extraordinary display of festive lights to celebrate the Christmas season, and it immediately became the focus of an ambitious goal: to create a public collection that would embody “a high culture capable of communicating with everyone,” as stated by Fiorenzo Alfieri, the visionary founder of the event. In recent years, Luci d’Artista has evolved into a true institution of contemporary art—widely loved and recognized, open and sustainable, and now active throughout the year, not just during the winter months. - Antonio Grulli
Piccoli spiriti blu (Little Blue Spirits) is composed of 72 circles of blue lights of different sizes, initially installed around the Gran Madre church, and then moved to Monte dei Cappuccini, where they surround the church, extending to a wing of the former convent. In both locations, the work contributes to changing the perception of space by creating an atmosphere of suspension with unreal tones. If before it was the aura of mystery that some attribute to the Gran Madre, it is now the fog on the Turin hill that amplifies the effect.
The energy that springs from the places is at the centre of other light installations created between the 1990s and 2000s, such as Spiriti di madreperla (Mother-of-pearl spirits), in piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, where white luminous rings suspended above cast-iron skulls emerging from the ground defined an energy field between earth and sky, evoking life facing eternity.