La Tenda Nera Initiation Memo

01 Origin

The project begins with a piece of black fabric hanging just inside the door of the Lidl-Trek team bus. Its practical purpose is simple: it stops the interior from being immediately visible from outside. But in doing so it creates a threshold.

On one side are tifosi, journalists, officials, cameras, noise and expectation. On the other are riders, staff, preparation, nerves and routine. The curtain does not simply conceal the bus. It divides two states of being: public performance and private readiness.

For that reason the study does not begin at sign-on, and it does not begin at kilometre zero. It begins at the moment the curtain is drawn aside and someone passes through it.

02 Reason for study

Professional cycling contains very few protected spaces. From team presentation to podium, riders exist in public. Roads are open. Crowds gather at arm’s length. Television broadcasts actions live. Team radio turns decision-making into spectacle. Even small interruptions can become part of the show.

The bus operates differently. It is not fully private, but it remains protected. It functions as a waiting room, briefing room, dressing room, canteen and recovery space all at once. It is where tactics are first spoken aloud and where emotions are later processed away from the scrutiny that defines the sport outside.

The study is therefore interested in the bus not simply as transport, but as one of the final environments in which riders can still be with themselves and with each other before and after becoming public.

03 A fixed place inside a moving race

During a stage race almost everything changes. Hotels change. Towns change. Roads, weather, pressure and morale change. The bus is the one place that remains recognisably the same each day.

Riders return to the same seat and the same small arrangement of belongings: hairbands, books, headphones, shoes, food, puzzles, radios, coffee cups and good-luck objects. Over time this becomes a form of organised chaos, a repeated claim on space inside an event otherwise defined by movement.

This constancy matters. Familiarity offers control. Routine reduces decision-making. Repetition helps riders manage uncertainty. The bus becomes, in practical and psychological terms, a temporary home. The study will pay close attention to how that home is built, inhabited and relied upon.

04 The kilometres that don’t count

The official race begins at kilometre zero and ends at the finish line. The lived day begins earlier and finishes later. Riders and staff move from bus parking to sign-on, from sign-on to kilometre zero, then after the stage from finish infrastructure back to the bus and behind the curtain once more.

These distances are usually ignored. They sit outside the race book, outside most reporting and outside the symbolic story the sport tells about itself. Yet they shape the rhythm of every stage day and define the physical relationship between protected space and public performance.

Alongside photographic observation and written testimony, the study will therefore record these overlooked sections using simple stage diagrams, place names, coordinates and distances. The aim is not to correct the race, but to reveal another geography running parallel to it.

05 Planned output

The intended output is a 16-page printed zine titled La Tenda Nera. The publication should function less like race coverage and more like a field document, combining photography, writing, testimony and simple logistical data around one central idea: that the black curtain marks the threshold between private preparation and public exposure.

The structure will be deliberate. The title and opening line should establish the thesis. A stage-by-stage spread should map the kilometres that don’t count. The photographic material should remain embedded inside the bus, concentrating on rituals, objects, posture, conversation and silence. Short rider testimonies should give first-person voice to the bus as home, refuge, meeting point and reset mechanism.

Alongside this, Rachel Jary will contribute a written response drawn from her embedded position around the team. Her role is not to produce conventional race reporting, but to help articulate the texture of life around the curtain and to show, through one or more observed scenes, how the bus holds focus, tension, truth and recovery before returning riders to the world outside.

06 Archive status

This memo records the reasoning at initiation, but it is retained here after completion because the study was ultimately realised in broadly the same terms.

Fieldwork was carried out while embedded with Lidl-Trek during the 37th Giro d’Italia Women, 30 May to 07 June 2026.

The completed zine, La Tenda Nera, preserves the structure described above: the black curtain as title and organising device, the unofficial distance study, Rachel Jary’s written contribution, rider testimony and a photographic archive of the bus as a protected threshold before and after public performance.

As such, this document should be read not as a separate brief, but as the originating note for the publication that followed.