VALENTINO’s Interferenze campaign was shot at Centrale Montemartini, conceived in the early 20th century on the left bank of the Tiber. This power station was Rome’s first public electricity plant before its conversion, in 1997, into a satellite venue of the Capitoline Museums. Its hybrid nature, suspended between classical statuary and industrial archaeology, constitutes the generative principle of the campaign.
Here, the images do not simply use the site as a backdrop; they extend its internal logic. Centrale Montemartini thus becomes the stage for impossible imagination: a space where elements from seemingly incompatible worlds cease to exclude one another and instead coexist, unleashing new narratives.
Valentino Interferenze Campaign
Centrale Montemartini is a metaphysical place, an in-between realm where the age of the gods and that of machines, myth and progress, memory and invention no longer belong to separate temporalities. Here, the classical beauty of the Roman statues resonates with the looming grandeur of the turbines and boilers that powered industrial modernity. Fragments of pagan eternity emerge among the cathedrals of technology, in a space that eludes every classification. Centrale Montemartini is more than a museum; it is an alchemical space where the fertile contagion between different worlds is continually staged.
The result of this encounter is a transmutation that does not affect the individual elements, but rather the force field generated between them. Something further takes shape, something irreducible to the mere sum of its parts. Stripped of the museum’s chronological framework, antiquity no longer belongs solely to the past; deprived of their function, the machines cease to be mere residues of modernity. In their juxtaposition, both escape the linearity of history and are reassembled into a new constellation of meaning.
Valentino Interferenze Campaign
From this perspective, Centrale Montemartini recalls Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas: not so much an archive of memory as an apparatus of montage in which images drawn from disparate contexts, precisely through their juxtaposition, generate resonances and new possibilities of interpretation.
The goddess Fortuna, the muse Polyhymnia, and Queen Cleopatra rise among the colossal diesel engines, alternators, massive flywheels, and overhead cranes of the machine hall. Here, the dialogue between the ancient statuary and the industrial archaeology transforms both. The pallor of marble meets the opacity of cast iron, anatomical perfection challenges mechanical power, and sculptural equilibrium clashes with the monumentality of engineering.
Valentino Interferenze Campaign
Every presence modifies the perception of the others, giving birth to a landscape where time no longer unfolds as a succession of events, but rather as a logic of co-presence. Light pierces the space, sudden and swift. Fragments of bodies, marble profiles, and titanic iron backbones emerge. The lightness of the garments confronts the gravity of the steel, while the gestures of the living bodies seem to extend those carved in stone. In the background, the massive machines loom silently, almost dissolved in the darkness that envelops them. Nothing appears permanently still, yet nothing actually moves.
by Chidozie Obasi