La luce e la fabbrica. A partire da Luigi Nono

This essay examines Luigi Nono’s La fabbrica illuminata (1964) by taking its central image — li- ght — not as metaphor but literally: an approach already developed by the author in his Sul filo (2024). Starting from a technical analysis of industrial lighting at the Italsider steelworks in Ge- noa Cornigliano, which Nono visited in 1963, the essay reads the composition in counterpoint with the history of factory illumination. Indifferent to the worker’s body, industrial lighting equates labour and machinery, rendering individual presence invisible under a homogeneous gh electronic technique. The analysis traces the evolution from Fordist factory lighting to the Toyota model’s ergonomic systems and, finally, to the “lights-out factory” of full automation and AI governed, where darkness no longer signals liberation but a new form of dispossession. Against this trajectory, La fabbrica illuminata reveals its enduring political force: a wager that the same energy sustaining the furnaces may contain the seed of its own undoing.