From 30 January 2026 to 6 January 2027, Le Gallerie di Piedicastello will host the exhibition "Competition – Conjunction rings", a special exhibition held on the occasion of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics.
Third and final act of the multi-year project "Conjunction Rings", the Competition exhibition explores the theme of emotions in Olympic and Paralympic sports by accompanying visitors in the mind of the athlete before, after and during the competitive experience.
Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust: how do you decline the 6 basic emotions in past and present experiences of the Olympic and Paralympic disciplines?
Constant presence in sport, emotions unite athletes and the public in the Olympics and Paralympics of yesterday and today, on and off the field of play. For this reason, the exhibition opens with a journey to discover the birth of basic emotions through the nineteenth-century studies of Charles Darwin on "facial expressions in humans and animals" and through the scientific discoveries of the American psychologist Paul Ekman in the second half of the twentieth century. Athletes who know how to better manage their emotions make a difference today. At the highest levels of competitions, physical and technical diversities are minimal. For this reason, where medals are played on the thread of the thousandths, the emotional aspect is increasingly important in professional sport. Emotional intelligence, emotion management and the ability to stay focused are the determining factors. There are no good or bad emotions in this sense in order to achieve the best performance, but there are different ways to exploit emotions as your allies and to know how to translate them into positive energy before, during and after the race.
"Speed and Emotion", "Before the competition", "During the competition" and "After the competition": these are the main areas of the exhibition, each of which is presented as a large immersive audiovisual installation. All the images in these installations come from the rich archives of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne
These sections are accompanied by two interactive workstations: "Face recognition" and "Words of Olympians".
In "Face recognition" the visitor is called to an immediate and personal interaction. As soon as you position yourself in front of the workstation, the system activates and invites you to reproduce the athlete's expressions in sport. The heart of the experience lies in the response of the system: once the emotion is recognized, the installation presents the visitor with a gallery of images of the Olympians caught in the same emotional state, creating a powerful and instantaneous bond of empathy.
The installation "Words of Olympians" – the emotional heart of the exhibition – allows the visitor to address his interview to the Olympian. In front of a horizontal interactive monitor with 12 questions, making your own choice you have access to the answers that a selection of medaled athletes has provided to that question. The voices and faces of the medal winners then appear on a series of vertical monitors surrounding the workstation. The title of this section is named after an initiative of the Olympic Museum dedicated to oral history. "Words of Olympians" was born in Lausanne in 2009 with the aim of recording the personal stories of those who experienced the Games firsthand.
Finally, at the end of the exhibition, the installation on the "Theatres of competition" closes the exhibition with a description of the facilities that will host the competitions in Trentino during the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Milan Cortina 2026.
Many interactive spaces with an entire area designed for young people: the "Digital Gym" and the VR workstation, with 12 headsets available for classes and visitors.
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Information
- Closed 25 December 2026
- 1 January 2027 open from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
- Open during other holidays, unless otherwise indicated
- Free admission
