The factory communicates A Century of Turin Industry

15 november 2006 - 28 january 2007

Curated by Ugo Volli

The Project

The purpose of this exhibition is to illustrate the one hundred year history of industry in Turin (or, more accurately, its official organization, the Unione Industriale, or Industrial Union), beginning with the communication of the factory. This is not an obvious theme. For the most part we are accustomed to thinking that the factory does not communicate, but only produces, namely that it is the place and central institution in modern life where raw materials are transformed into semi-finished or finished products, organizing collective labor according to knowledge that is increasingly complex because it incorporates experience and technical-scientific progress. n other words it is taken for grated that the factory is exclusively the closed and self-organized place of doing, while it is thought to have few and only indirect relationships with the saying of communication. Indeed this latter activity would be considered secondary and derivative, a sort of final lubricant before goods are placed on the market.

In fact this is not how things stand. Factories do communicate, first of all by doing their work, that is, by producing; the products themselves are communication. In a world where everyday items are more or less all produced industrially, factories always contain a double level of communication. First of all there is the initial, basic communication, where the merchandise says that it exists and what it is, where it describes itself as a car, trousers, typewriter, or refrigerator. This “telling” is very concrete and is expressed in certain physical characteristics that serve to identify the typology of merchandise and to give implicit instructions regarding its use. And so there are rules, not necessarily functional, but very rigid, about the appearance of goods: codes of meaning. Objects emerge from the factory, created according to typologies that were initially invented by their very production. But then they become established, they hold up over time, they are modified only slowly, they provide instructions for use, and they allow everyone to easily identify each object.

Then there is a second level of the factory’s communication. This logically comes later, but it is equally important. There is never just one refrigerator, just one pair of jeans, or just one car, even if, broadly speaking, every well made good of each of these typologies wonderfully performs the fundamental task of refrigeration, transporting people, or covering up the legs. In social life, every commodity indicates not only its functionality and the circumstances of its use, but also the less functional data of its age, its price level, and finally and above all, its “taste” and the “world” it expresses. These much finer bits of information are also essential for the social use of objects. We are all experts (even without knowing it) at using them to express ourselves, to construct “the image” of ourselves that satisfies us or that we consider suitable, for sending out messages into the surrounding environment; and we are also experts at deciphering their meaning when we see them adopted by others. All this occurs thanks to the end capacity to communicate, which is due to the variety of goods of the same typology. From this viewpoint, every industry that produces consumer goods, at the same time provides its clients with means of communication. Not only does industry always communicate, it also makes its consumers communicate.

Throughout its history, industry in Turin has been particularly effective in carrying out these difficult communicative tasks – both the first task, which consists in proposing new product typologies and having people envision their potential, and the second task, which is to establish vital differences between industrially uniform goods. Its vocation has always been communicative, in the sense of proposing products for consumers, families, and everyday people who, in part thanks to consumerism, constructed their own self-image. What matters is noting that in these cases too, the intertwining of communication and production, of market and factory, is crucial for making products alluring and allowing them to be positioned as central to the public’s interests and passions, and not only its “needs.” These one hundred years of Piedmont industry have also been rich in intuitions and expectations, which too often have been forgotten and hidden. Today it is important to revisit these and to understand that industry always and necessarily “communicates.”

The exhibition

In the first space – Factory – multi-vision audio-visual technology will present visitors with a virtual reality of the factory floor. Factories have changed a great deal during these one hundred years, from the first textile and mechanical mills, to assembly lines (introduced in the 1920s), to the automated plants that began to appear in the 1980s. But the power of the machine remains, along with the scale and the intimate and careful relationship between human labor, machines, and products. The second space – History – is devoted to a reflection and information on how the industrial reality in the Piedmont developed over one hundred years. The principal events on a historical and social level, the principal products launched, and employment and development statistics are exhibited so as to create a timeline on which the communication of Turin industries can be located. The third space – Communication – shows some of the most significant products that emerged in the twentieth century from factories in the Turin region, along with the communication about them that took place. This sector is subdivided into four sections, organized according to typology of goods. The first – Mechanics – relates to major industries and what they have spawned: the automobile, first of all, but also other mechanical developments. A section devoted to food – Food and Beverage – follows, where industrial production in Turin has been preeminent: especially chocolate and sweets, alcoholic beverages, and coffee. The third section – Body – is devoted to clothing and cosmetics; the fourth section – Communication – focuses on radio and television, cinema, the telephone industry, and publishing.

In recent decades, Piedmont industry, like Italian and European industry in general, has found itself facing the delicate and difficult challenges of globalization. A great transformation is in process, moving toward a future that certainly will have to be open to many innovations. The last area of the show – Scenarios – addresses this and will include opinions by leading figures in the city’s scientific, industrial, and political communities, alternating with films and images that demonstrate current innovations and technological research.

Ugo Volli