Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea has commissioned for the City of Turin an unprecedented public lighting installation designed by the Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi(Modena, 1973) for Luci d’Artista.

The Turin-based Luci d’Artista festival, established in 1998 and unique in the world, represents a veritable open-air contemporary art exhibition that every year from the end of October to the beginning of January illuminates the squares and streets of Turin from the center to the outskirts.

Roberto Cuoghi’s work M I R A C O L A is an unprecedented and synaesthetic experience in one of Turin’s main squares, Piazza San Carlo, where public and private lights will periodically fade, creating a luminous choreography that immerses passers-by in moments of absolute darkness, to then illuminate the square. The passage from light to darkness generates tension and expectation.

M I R A C O L A (from mirari – admire), suggests a visual phenomenon out of the ordinary, attributed to supernatural causes. The experience of darkness that appears as a result of the synchronization of the lights of the square appears as the miraculous experience of disappearance, of not appearing.

Roberto Cuoghi states, “I have symphonized the lights of the ‘living room’ of Turin, to force them to consider the cognitive constraints that separate light from darkness; for the characteristics that I wanted it to have and that it has, M I R A C O L A is an anti-rhetorical work, not vandalizable, replicable and non-invasive.”