The Eurovision Song contest attracts performers from more than 40 countries every year, and worldwide television audiences of more than 180 million—that's almost double the number for the Super Bowl Halftime Show. This year's competition takes place in Turin, Italy, and Live Design talked to Italian powerhouse designer Francesca Montinaro about her work designing the stage seen around the world.
LD: Have you worked on projects of a similar scale to Eurovision?
FM: Yes, I have worked on projects of this scale and budget, like private large-scale events or collaborating with some of the best architectural firms in the world designing interactive museums.
Live Design: Was designing for the Festival di Sanremo helpful in understanding the design parameters and ethos of the event, or did the size and budget of the international competition free you to do what you wanted?
Francesca Montinaro: Festival di Sanremo has been very useful to fight an Italian taboo. I have been the first woman to design that stage after 63 years. And the same thing has been for Eurovision 2022. In any project that I work on, I am always free to express myself, especially in this case being a very complex international competition where I competed against other eight design studios.
LD: You have described the greenery in the artists area as a “lush, Italian garden.” What other concepts did you incorporate?
FM: The design has three main concepts that I wanted to develop in order to describe Italian creativity. To do so, I decided to use water, light, and the beautiful land we have to describe our amazing past, present, and future beauty.
LD: Will the plants used in the staging be real for the week of the show?
FM: The plants are real. The entire garden comes from a supplier from Pistoia, in Tuscany.
LD: Can you talk a little bit about the pool and waterfall, what it represents and how you are handling the reflection from the water and any safety or sound issues?
FM: The water represents the Mediterranean Sea, so my actual answer would be a “drop of the sea.” The pool is filled with about 4,000 gallons of water and it works with a closed system thanks to which water tanks are not necessary in the venue. The pool and the waterfall are completely customized and we have used filters to clean the water, plus there is also a UV system that removes the bacteria with special lamps.
We have managed not to have any kind of interference: both the lighting of the pool and the waterfall have been designed with the lighting department.
The fountain is in action all the time and the noise is exactly the sound of the sea, that doesn’t affect the sound of the venue.
LD: The stage sketches show a series of arches within arches, can you tell me how they are used?
FM: The arches that you see in the sketches are the ones composing the Sun. The amazing theatrical and futuristic machine at the center of the stage. There are six arches and they are built with aluminum arch-shaped trusses, plus a semicircular aluminum structure in the center. Each of the arches is double sided: one side has a huge custom LED screen realized with dynamic stripe LED covered by PVC panels and the other side hosts the DOP lights.
LD: Can you talk a little about the stages? The B stage and your use of LED?
FM: That’s what we call the Rock stage where the artists can go thanks to the walkways on each side of the main stage. It is a wooden structure with a black glossy finish. The main stage is in the shape of a drop and it is two meter high covering an area of about 500 sqm. This is made by a custom layer structure covered by wooden tiles with a black glossy finish and a LED floor. A triangular LED floor of 100 sq meters completes the main stage floor and behind the Sun there is a 13 meter high curved LED screen
LD: What has been the hardest challenge on this project?
FM: You always have issues on projects, especially in big ones like this. Here for example, lack of time was the main one. Because to build and then to set up the overall stage we had just two and a half months. That has been our hardest challenge.
LD: What is your favorite part of this project?
FM: The fact that the monumental proportions of the stage are very impactful and are amazing to experience both from TV screens and IRL.
LD: I believe there are immersive experience elements to the overall design which have been hinted at. Without breaking any secrets, can you tell me if you have made specific elements of your design to accommodate them?
FM: Yes, the most interesting part of this project is that analog and digital feature are mixed together. So that while watching and experiencing the show you can really smells the perfume of the real plants in the greenroom and listen to the sound of water, for example