Il traforo del Sempione e l’Esposizione di Milano 1906. Fratture epistemiche nei meccanismi di visione e rappresentazione del panorama motorio

The Sempione Exhibition, held in Milan in 1906 to celebrate the achievement of the Italian-Swiss tunnel, provides a privileged analytical terrain for tracing some of the profound transformations taking place in the early twentieth century in terms of the relationship between a moving observer and the landscape they pass through, whether real or simulated. Both the object of the celebration itself, the tunnel, and the composition of the exhibition centers reveal a contrast between a representative tradition of travel and a profound rethinking of it, distinguished first and foremost by the presence of modern modes of transportation, with their metal bodies and unusual speeds. What results is a new form of panoramic gaze that is noticeably motor, due to the dynamism that undepins it, and of which multiple traces can be found in the media and visual production of the Exhibition. A multifaceted and heterogeneous case study, but from which emerges a coherent series of critical issues that imply both a new topological mode of representation of the territory, modernising previous canons of distance and duration, and an update of the kinaesthetic involvement of the passenger-observer, increasingly tense between adrenaline-filled inputs and logics of harnessing in the machinic body.