Sensitive City is an interactive work dedicated to an ideal and counter-utopian city, set up based on the relations, the memories, but also the dreams and fears of its inhabitants.

The images and the stories, collected in different Italian centres and areas, form the setting for a city that is undergoing constant evolution, stretched out into space, which the visitors explore and manipulate by interacting with the feelings and sensations of the people that live there.

Sensitive City is a city that cannot be conceived as an abstraction, or be casually superimposed over a certain territory or be created based on an idea produced by a single mind. Instead, it is constructed and deconstructed every time it is described, it goes beyond the visible spectrum, it is deep, layered, full of hidden deposits of memory and emotion.

This city is polycentric, and it is shaped before one’s eyes by the stories told by different people who present the visitor with maps of their own personal experiences, their memories of these places they are so fond of and their views on their imagined lands.

The only way to explore it is to stop a passer-by and follow their instructions, by touching the virtual figures which dissect the space and by observing the images that lead to the place where the story is told.  The relationship born of this gesture changes and shapes the city’s representation.

Sensitive City is born and transformed by following the scheme of the relations that originate out of the environment in which the work is displayed. Conversely the scheme also depends on the relationships that the town’s inhabitants have set up with the places they hold dear to them. Gesture upon gesture the city appears like a place of light and shadow where the water and the earth intermingle, emptiness produces form, silence induces listening, the centre forms an organic whole with its surroundings and the wind defies all boundaries.

For a number of years now Studio Azzurro has been addressing issues related to the values pertaining to memories, places and communities by engaging in the creation of a cycle of open air works termed Portatori di Storie (Story Bearers) in which the visitors are required to take a very active part in discovering the different territories through the stories of their inhabitants. The first works along these lines were presented at the Espace d’Art Actua in Casablanca and at the International SITE Santa Fe Biennial. Even the more specific issue of urbanisation and cities has been addressed through a number of projects including Megalopoli for the VII Biennale di Architettura in Venice and La città degli occhi, (The city of eyes), loosely based on Italo Calvino's "Città Invisibili”, for the Milan Triennale.