In 2024, the forest of Ronco in Cortina d’Ampezzo (Italy) was cut down to make room for the new Eugenio Monti bobsleigh track, named after the previous one, built in preparation for the upcoming 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games. A 1,730-meter-long concrete structure now runs along the mountainside, where once stood 560 larches and 260 shrubs, a total of 820 plants, some centuries old, which played an important role in CO₂ absorption, water retention, and protection of the inhabited area below from landslides or falling debris. Not to mention the scenic and social value the forest provided.
An infrastructure presented as necessary, useful, even “sustainable,” but which in reality proves to be yet another example of land consumption disguised as progress.
A vision of progress built on haste: build fast, build big, build at all costs because what matters is to show that “Italy gets things done”. Meanwhile, the forest is gone, and what was alive yesterday is now just surface to be paved over and concealed.
But there is a solution: for every tree cut down, twelve will be planted within the municipality of Cortina d’Ampezzo by 2026 over ten thousand new trees in total.
However, this promise, aside from not being publicly documented to date, hides a major simplification: planting new trees does not equate to replacing a mature forest. It takes decades for trees to begin storing significant amounts of carbon. In many cases, it is trees between 70 and 150 years old that offer the greatest contribution in terms of CO₂ absorption, soil stability, water filtration, oxygen production, and habitat for numerous species.
Climate change is already reshaping the future of the Alps: rising temperatures and declining snowfall make winter sports increasingly uncertain each year especially at medium to low altitudes like those of the Dolomites. In this context, even a state-of-the-art facility like the Cortina track, equipped with a glycol-based refrigeration system, cannot be considered sustainable.
If it requires millions of euros annually in energy just to function, and depends on a winter that no longer exists, then it’s not a farsighted choice: it’s a bet that’s already lost.
So how can the construction of such an impactful, expensive, and short-lived structure be justified? Perhaps in the desire to prove that “Italy can do it” even at the cost of sacrificing a forest, a territory, and our coherence with the climate reality we are already facing.
My project seeks to highlight and make tangible the loss we are already enduring.
It is not just a denunciation, but an act of remembrance because what is accepted today as “necessary” risks becoming the norm tomorrow. If cutting down a centuries-old forest to build a bobsleigh track can be justified today, then no place will ever be truly safe in the future.
The felled trees and shrubs are here represented by pieces of recycled charcoal: 560 larger pieces symbolizing the larches, and 260 smaller ones representing the shrubs.
Charcoal is the residue of combustion: the physical symbol of plant life reduced to waste, to absence; a forest erased, dead, to make space for an infrastructure whose usefulness is already in question and whose future is uncertain.
In the title, the word “concrete” carries a double meaning: it refers both to the concrete material that has physically replaced the forest, and to something concrete in the sense of real, tangible, actually accomplished, what was once a plan is now reality. No longer a hypothesis, but an irreversible transformation of the landscape: visible to all, heavy, final.
Concrete has concretely replaced what once was life.
