CAPTURES Turin Chess Festival — Chess, Photography and Three Boards That Did Not Come Home

CAPTURES — Turin Chess Festival

CAPTURES – Turin Chess Festival was not a standard chess event. It was conceived as a meeting point between chess, photography, and urban culture — a festival where the board entered a different kind of space and began to speak a different visual language.

The official programme placed the event at CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Turin on 21–22 March 2026, built around the concept Different Moves. One Game. That phrase described the festival itself: many formats, many perspectives, one shared cultural frame.

For ChessboArt, this mattered immediately. Our boards were not entering a random public hall or a purely competitive setting. They were entering a venue where form, composition, materials, and visual presence already mattered. In other words: a place where beauty is not secondary to function, but part of the point.

Why CAMERA Was the Right Place

There are partnerships that look good on paper, and there are partnerships that feel inevitable the moment you see them in context. This was the second kind.

CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia is one of Turin's key cultural institutions devoted to photography. CAPTURES used that setting not as a backdrop, but as part of the meaning of the event itself: chess was shown not only as competition, but as image, rhythm, contrast, and cultural presence.

This is exactly where ChessboArt belongs. Our work has always lived between two worlds: play and display, function and objecthood, chess and interior presence. In Turin, that language was immediately understood.

Different Moves, One Game

The programme explains why the festival felt genuinely fresh. Saturday evening — named La notte bianca (e nera) — combined a rapid tournament in the exhibition spaces with the CAPTURE photography exhibition and live jazz. A single evening, three different registers: sport, art, music.

Sunday shifted toward the social and educational dimension — with activities for children, inclusion-focused workshops, and a women's simultaneous display in which one player faced ten opponents at once. That range is what made CAPTURES so convincing. It did not reduce chess to one identity. It allowed the game to be competitive, educational, social, and aesthetic at the same time.

For a brand like ChessboArt, this kind of festival is especially meaningful because it confirms something we have believed from the beginning: chess deserves contexts that are richer than the purely functional. It belongs in museums, galleries, carefully designed interiors, and cultural programmes that understand atmosphere as part of experience.

The CAPTURE Exhibition by Stev Bonhage

At the centre of the festival was CAPTURE, a travelling photographic project by Stev Bonhage, produced in collaboration with FIDE. The project documents contemporary chess through a visual language that is anything but expected: intimate, stylised, and genuinely beautiful. It spans elite tournament halls, street chess, and — perhaps most powerfully — chess inside prisons as part of FIDE's Chess for Freedom programme.

CAPTURE has been described as merging chess, art, education, competition, tradition, and lifestyle into a single visual experience. Seeing it inside CAMERA — a venue designed around the serious appreciation of photography — gave it exactly the context it deserved.

ChessboArt as Official Partner

ChessboArt was present at CAPTURES not as an afterthought, but as an official partner. That matters. It means the fit was recognised in advance: not just product placement, but a real alignment between the event's visual and cultural ambitions and the objects we make.

The boards were visible inside the event space, on stage, and in a context where visitors were able to judge them directly — not through a product page, not through advertising, but in person, in a place built around visual sensitivity. That is a much more demanding test.

When people encounter a board in real life, especially in a cultural venue, everything becomes clearer: the proportion, the material, the finish, the presence, the seriousness of the object. Turin gave exactly that kind of encounter.

The Strongest Reference: Sold on the Spot

There are many ways to measure whether a presentation worked. Applause is pleasant. Good photos help. Strong branding matters. But sometimes the clearest verdict is the simplest one:

It would be hard to imagine a better reference than that. In Turin, at a festival devoted to chess, photography, and beauty, the objects did not merely look appropriate. They were chosen.

That matters because it says something more powerful than a compliment. It says that in the right setting — among people who care about visual culture and quality — ChessboArt does not need a long explanation. The work speaks for itself.

Why This Matters for ChessboArt

Turin was important not only because it was in Italy, and not only because the venue was exceptional. It mattered because it confirmed something fundamental about where ChessboArt belongs.

Our boards are made for spaces where chess is treated seriously, but not narrowly — where it can be admired, discussed, taught, played, and collected. A photography centre in Turin may seem unusual if one thinks about chess only as tournament play. For us, it felt exact.

This is also why events like CAPTURES matter so much more than ordinary exposure. They create a setting where the board is seen in full: as a chess object, a crafted object, and a visual object. When all three are understood at once, the conversation changes.

And sometimes, as in Turin, the result is immediate.

Text: Michał Fudalej / ChessboArt

Resources and Links

• 🌐 Official event page: CAPTURES – Turin Chess Festival (SST)
• 📍 Tourism listing: Turismo Torino
• 📷 Venue: CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia
• 🖼️ CAPTURE exhibition: FIDE — Capture project
• 📰 Press coverage: Corriere di Torino
• 🛒 ChessboArt wall chess sets: chessboart.com — wall chess sets
• 🛒 Build your wall chess set: chessboart.com — configurator
• 🛒 Wooden chess clocks: chessboart.com — chess clocks

Selected visuals in this article come from the official festival brochure and event photographs provided after the event.