exhibition

06/02/2024

Galleria in Trento

In collaboration with Jeffrey Schnapp

Records Exhibition Galleria Trento

The history of Olympic sport is written in records. Records tell the tale of individual athletes and national teams, of the rise and fall of ancient and modern sports, of changing approaches to athletic training and preparation. They also track the history of human achievements: firsts that are followed by new firsts in the pursuit of ever higher summits of excellence. Records are achieved by human bodies that compete both against their peers and against precedent, which is to say, against the “record book.” Technologies for the measurement of time and speed are integral to that book because records are measured in time and speed.

Opened at the beginning of February 2024 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony led by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, Records is the first of three exhibitions that will accompany the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. The entire series is entitled Anelli di congiunzione or “interconnecting rings.”

The exhibition itinerary includes an immersive data storytelling installation involving a century of Winter Olympic competition data including every athlete who ever competed in the Winter games from the Saint Moritz games of 1924 to the present. The records that document each of these facets of the Olympic movement tell a richly detailed, multilayered tale that can be experienced at the micro-scale of individual athletes (the teams on which they competed, the medals they won, their gender, height or weight) or the macro-scale of an entire century of Olympic history and tradition.