Preview of the next round of events in the review Sunday at the Town Hall scheduled from February 2, the event curated by Lorenzo Balbi and promoted by MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna | Bologna Museums Institution in collaboration with the Municipal Theater Foundation of Bologna, is presented to ART CITY Bologna after two previous performances: in 2012 in Rome, in the MACRO Testaccio museum, and in 2016 in Geneva, under the covered market of Saint Jean.
Valentina Vetturi invites seven professional conductors – Alessandro Carrer, Caterina Centofante, Alicia Galli, Bernardo Lo Sterzo, Fabio Sperandio, Simone Valeri, Alissia Venier – to conduct the same score, the piece Introduction and cheerful. Pour harpe, flûte, clarinette et quatuorcomposed in 1905 by Maurice Ravel for seven instruments (harp, flute, clarinet and a string quartet).
La performance is continuous and has a total duration of about three hours, during which each conductor performs the eleven-minute piece by Maurice Ravel. In the course of the action, the work is then repeated over and over again, with a regular pause between each single end and each new beginning, in a sort of asynchronous loop in which each conductor interprets the tempo in his own way. . If the first breath is common, in the subsequent course of action, seven different temporal dimensions coexist in this orchestra of conductors.
With this performance, the artist enters into dialogue with the musical tradition of the second half of the 900th century, in fact the references to John Cage by Two pieces (1946), part of a series of piano works with the aid of preparation that explore the resources of the instrument through a disjointed game of fragmentations, pauses and silences conducted with a rigorous control of the dynamics, of4'33" (1952), in which a pianist opens the piano lid and closes it after the classic duration of a vinyl single without playing a note, and again Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras (1981), in which five orchestras tackle the same program of short pieces of music, just like the trains that often run in different directions at New York Central Station. However Vetturi, with his orchestra extended over time, shifts those gestures in a completely different dimension from aphasia, focusing the performance on the body of his performers and on the relationship between this body and the environment.
Conductors: Alessandro Carrer, Caterina Centofante, Alicia Galli, Bernardo Lo Sterzo, Fabio Sperandio, Simone Valeri, Alissia Venier.
La fruition of the public is free during the performance, admission is free while seats last.
Valentina Vetturi (Reggio Calabria, 1979) is a researcher and a visual and performative artist. Her artistic practice weaves writing, performance and memory, beyond the private dimension and seeking unexpected visual possibilities. Vetturi looks at writing as an extended practice that includes word and sound in a sculptural dimension. The voices and characters that populate her performances and installations are vehicles of apparently very distant fragments of reality. Hackers, ghostwriters, orchestra conductors (in the absence of an orchestra), the sound memories of Alzheimer's patients, up to the disappearance of Ettore Majorana, staged in a game of chess, they move on the borderline between presence and absence, interpreters invisible to the world around us. Long performative research processes are at the origin of her works, whose final form, from the theatrical scene to the daily performance on a commuter train, from the sound story to writing as a sign, excludes any given linguistic frame.
