MILAN MILANO ITALY | VIA MONTENAPOLEONE PEOPLE & EVENTS | PEOPLE & EVENTS IN VIA MONTENAPOLEONE

The exhibition Fabrica: les yeux ouverts at the Triennale was recently visited by an illustrious guest: Mr Al Gore. Bill Clinton’s former right hand man was the guest of honour at the exhibition entitled Les Yeux Ouverts where he discovered that a good portion of the work created by the young artists associated with the studio that was founded by Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani 13 years ago in Treviso centres around the theme of ecology, which is so important to him and where he also baptised the new issue of the magazine Colors 271 – Benvenuti a Vörland, which is dedicated to environmental sustainability. After all, it is this environmental focus that distinguishes Milan’s version of Les Yeux Ouverts, from the Parisian debut that was held at the Centre Pompidou.
Escorted as if he were still in office, the creator of the Oscar winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, was treated like a movie star.
Luciano and Gilberto Benetton, Carlo De Benedetti and representatives from the Moratti family, Milly, wife of Massimo, along with Stefano Boeri, not to mention other famous faces like Alessandro Cecchi Paone and Andrea Pezzi were all seated in the front row to hear this champion of environmental sustainability speak. The former Vice President of the United States of America, who lost the U.S. presidential election in the year 2000 by a handful of votes to George W. Bush, now refers to himself as the “former future President of the United States of America”, with a touch of irony and also a bit of earnestness, was on stage in front of an audience that spoke a variety of languages and came from a range of different backgrounds: a group of people who are committed to the theme “Save the Planet”. These are people who face environmental issues like global warming, greenhouse gases, sustainable living and flexible mechanisms with a missionary spirit that is sometimes Manichaean. These are the people who dream of living on, or at least taking a holiday to the Scandinavian island of Vörland – which has become the international symbol of environmental change -, who do not disdain the use of bicycles and who in real life, are employed by big business or simply aspire to earn a decent living or just to find regular employment. These are people who are so different from one another, yet so alike.
“Nothing has been resolved by the G8,” was Al Gore’s introduction to the audience that filled the main hall at the Triennale as well as the crowd that watched his speech on the maxi-screen that was set up in the gardens of the Triennale. Al Gore accused the world’s economic leaders, first and foremost his own country, of failing to reach an agreement regarding the world’s climate, revealing that he was “embarrassed” by Washington’s obstructionism. “Words were chosen to give the impression that some form of progress was being made, but in reality it was just semantics,” Gore said in reference to the formula used at the top level of the G8 meeting held in Germany. He then revealed his own idea for handling an increasingly hot topic: “This climatic crisis provides us with an opportunity to experiment with something that very few generations throughout the course of history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational mission, a convincing moral objective, a common cause and the exciting perspective of being obligated by circumstances to put aside petty issues and political conflicts in order to embrace a genuinely moral and spiritual challenge.”
For more than 40 minutes, the former Vice President of the United States of America, who has become the spokesperson for the “Live Earth” campaign which includes a series of concerts across the globe, reeled of the main points of this crusade, for which he is currently in service on a permanent worldwide tour to promote his “inconvenient truth” regarding the world’s population explosion, the use of technology and renewable sources of energy. Thank you Mr Gore, from the people who are out to “Save the Planet”.

LA TRIENNALE DI MILANO
Viale Alemagna, 6
20121 Milano
tel. +39 02 724341
info@triennale.it

FABRICA
Via Ferrarezza
Catena di Villorba
31100, Treviso
Italy
lisa@fabrica.it