For years I was a musician. And what stayed with me most from that time isn't a concert: it's arriving at the venues. Walking into a club I was used to seeing as a spectator, in the dark, full of people and music, and finding it by day with the lights on, empty, no one at the bar. A space everyone knows one way, and that I was seeing the other way: bare, silent, before it became anything. I always felt it was a kind of privilege. And without realizing it, it became my work.
Today I work in immersive experiences, and the same thing holds true. When the audience walks in, the room is already dark, images move across the walls, sound fills the space. No one sees the “before”: the site surveys, the nights spent aligning projectors to the millimeter with the room, the days in a still empty space imagining where you'll place an emotion. I've spent more than ten years inside that before, and that's where I want to tell the story from.
My name is Fabio Vallana and I work as a Creative Producer & Production Manager. The word “producer” suggests logistics alone, but for me it's two jobs in one person. There's the part that holds everything up: schedules, spaces, teams, budgets, an opening that has to work. And there's the creative part, the one that gets me up in the morning: the storytelling, the rhythm of the visit, the way space guides whoever moves through it and, often, the sound, because I never really left music behind, and the sound design of many installations, videos and VR projects has passed through my hands, up to an entire score. The works you meet in an exhibition come from artists and teams I work alongside; what I give shape to is the experience you build around them. For now, at least, that's where my signature is.
The roots
I was born in Omegna, on Lake Orta: mountains, water, a small town. Maybe it's exactly a place like this that gives rise to the need to imagine bigger worlds. I left early, and it was the right choice: for nearly twenty years I chased those worlds elsewhere. Then I came back to live here. Not because the world had become too small for me, but because I understood that you carry the world with you: to build things that travel far, I needed a place to stop and think. Here silence isn't empty, it's room.
That doesn't mean standing still. A big part of what I do is born while traveling, or remotely, from whatever corner of the world I happen to be in. I like it that way: roots in one place, my mind free to work anywhere.
What I mean by “immersive”
It isn't projecting big images on a wall. An immersive experience works when video projection, light, sound and space stop being separate elements and become one thing: when you walk in and, for an hour, you're inside something instead of watching it from outside. That's where technique and storytelling meet, and the first has to make itself disappear so that only the second remains. When it works, whoever walks in comes out a little different than they went in. That's everything I aim for.
Starting over, every time
A project almost always begins with very little: a few photographs, a map, the measurements of a space on the other side of the world. From there you have to imagine everything, and then leave, arrive, and make that idea meet the reality of a city you didn't know the day before. Europe, Asia, Latin America: every place changes the rules, the light, the materials, the people, the timing, and every time you start solving from scratch. It's exhausting, and it doesn't always go as planned. But there's a moment that makes up for all of it: when you step into the finished room together with everyone else, see it lit for the first time the way it's meant to be, and what was on a sheet of paper is now all around you. I still haven't gotten used to it, and I hope I never do.
Florence
If Omegna is where I was born and where I live, Tuscany is where I became myself. I lived there for nearly twenty years, and it's where I built some of the most important things in my life. In Florence I worked for ten years, and that's where I learned much of this craft. A city like that isn't one you simply pass through: it stays inside you, and keeps working on you even when you're somewhere else.
Why this blog
Here I'll share a bit about the productions I work on and a bit about the things I go to see as a spectator: other exhibitions, other events, work by people I admire. What interests me is this way of telling stories through space, light and sound, from every angle you look at it. It will be a notebook, not a catalogue: field notes, some behind the scenes, thoughts on what makes an experience truly memorable. No rush, roughly once a month. If you're curious about what comes before the lights go down, you're in the right place.
Enjoy the read.