FUTURE IS NATURE
BUSINESS: Future is Nature
ADDRESS: via per Zubiena 42, 13884 – Sala Biellese (BIELLA)
EMAIL: info@futureisnature.com
WEBSITE: futureisnature.com
“ON CAMPUS” COURSE: ReStartAlp 2018
My passion for group games started during the summer camps I attended as a teenager. Getting adults to play in the midst of nature means helping them rediscover their “wild inner self”. This was my initial idea. After winning ReStartAlp, all I could do was get down to the business of playing”.
Francesco Trovò
“The name I chose, “Future is Nature”, is a gamble: it’s not easy to remember, it’s hard to pronounce for Italians, and it sounds like a tongue twister, but I didn’t want to choose a name that was too fairy-tale-like: future is nature, the playground of the future is nature” says Francesco Trovò.
We are walking in the woods, in Sala Biellese (BIELLA), on the morainic relief Serra Morenica, which separates the city of Biella from Ivrea (Turin). “I looked all over Piedmont for a space that would enable me to turn my idea into reality, and start selling 360-degree play experiences for adults. I needed an area that was neither too densely populated or built, nor too isolated” explains Francesco.
His idea has also become a Manifesto: “Stop. Think. About the time you were half a metre tall and running in the woods was your creed. About how cool that was. Now, you pay attention not to get dirty or, even worse, you teach your children not to. Why?
Thank goodness it’s not too late… we are on our way. We’ll make you play, we’ll make you sweat. We will dust off your hidden Peter Pan and his longing for Nature. And then we’ll pamper you, because you deserve it”.
«Future is Nature» is an amusement park, a playground, that helps “grown-ups” rediscover and set free their wild self. Participants can also play in the woods, in groups, and some activities are designed to be enjoyed at night, such as night-time hide-and-seek. “I nurtured this idea for a long time. I was looking for a ‘ pristine, pure, uncontaminated area. I started from a map, making a first cartographic analysis of Piedmont: I needed an area that was not too high in the mountains, but not too-hot in the summer either. The Serra Morenica is a green strip that runs across Piedmont, and it is still scarcely urbanised. I started touring it, first by car and then by bike – my great passion – until I saw this place. It was abandoned and run down, but it had a good potential”, says Francesco.
Night-time hide-and-seek
Future is Nature’s forest is the place where night-time hide-and-seek is played, with two opposing factions engaged in seeking each other out in the darkness. This is just one of the six group game activities we propose, at daytime or night-time, which are classified into the Action, Intellectual, Stealth, Survival and Tag categories. “Except for the arena hosting Archery Combat (with two teams pitted against each other with arrows), which we set up in the camping area, the other games do not involve any specific structures, because they are based on people’s action and movement” explains Francesco. The playground is the forest, it is nature: from Escape Wood (which is like escape room, – a logic game in which the competitors are locked in a room and try to get out using structural elements and solving codes, riddles, and puzzles – but set amongst the trees) to Hunger Games, a challenge for survival in which the competitors are alone in the “wild forest” and only have a backpack to rely on”.
