Radio Papesse

The final radioworks will be presented December 6th and 7th on Radio Papesse but since June 2012 a series of lectures and public meetings will take place to talk with the artists and get to know the work-in-progress of their residencies. Before listing the events, here there is an inaugurating note by curator Lucia Farinati:

From the newly constructed opera house to the suburbia of Florence, from Santa Croce sull’Arno to the industrial landscape of Larderello, and finally from the vineyards of Carmignano to the hills of Monterotondo, the itineraries of these journeys embrace a multi-layered landscape inhabited by multiple voices.

From each of these places begins a story and diverse modes of listening.

Davide Tidoni will investigate the spatial voids and the sonic remnants generated from the construction site of the new Maggio Fiorentino opera house.

Laura Malacart will work with a group of immigrants of Santa Croce sull’Arno to disentangle the linguistic as well as the social discrepancies incurred in the process of learning Italian as both a national and a foreign language.

By re-visiting the Dantesque scenarios of Larderello and Monterotondo, now populated by industrial plants of geothermal energy, Mikhail Karikis will engage with the literature and the socio-political history rooted in this landscape.

Allen S. Weiss will explore how word and voice enrich taste, exemplified by the complexities of Carmignano wine.

Viv Corringham will finally end these itineraries by discovering and re-tracing the favourite walks by "fiorentini" people.

What forges or inspires the sound stories of these authors, is not therefore the iconic landscape of Tuscan art history, much-travelled and known by tourism, but an ever-changing auditory, visual and sensorial landscape. To capture its metamorphosis is Davide Tidoni’s site-specific listening, Laura Malacart’s ventriloquial approach, Mikhail Karikis’s audio-visual performances, Viv Corringham’s shadow walks and Allen S. Weiss’s lyrical, multi-lingual explorations.

Despite their different methodologies and meanings, these are site-specific strategies and modes of listening focused on vocality: the embodied voice of singing and of speech, as well as the resonant (or disembodied) voice of inhabited places and architectures.

As a result it is toward the singularity of the human voice and the plurality of listening points that Nuovi Paesaggi lends its ear to.

As Andrei Tarkovskij has said about his film Nostalghia (shot in Tuscany in 1982), here emerges a …new world where those things come together naturally and of themselves which in our strange and relative earthly existence have for some reason, or by someone, been divided once and for all.

To bring the stories of Nuovi Paesaggi together will be the remote yet present space of radio. 

[Lucia Farinati]

CALENDAR

June 20th 2012, Villa Romana, Florence, 6.30 PM
The New Shape of Public Architecture - Public meeting with Davide Tidoni

In The New Shape of Public Architecture Davide Tidoni investigates the urban voids generated from the construction site at the new Maggio Fiorentino Opera House in Florence. The talk at Villa Romana will present the listening strategies and recording techniques that have been developed by Tidoni in response to several visits to the site.

Particular attention will be given to the process inherent in the creation of this work: an analysis of the contextual material, the relational listening practised in situ and the political implications of this approach. The presentation will be introduced by Lucia Farinati, curator of Nuovi Paesaggi - Sound Stories from Tuscany.

October 1st 2012, Villa Romana, Florence, 6.30 PM
Public meeting with Mikhail Karikis

Karikis presents work in progress developed in the context of his Radio Papesse residency in Villa Romana. He will also talk about the role of sound and the voice in recent projects presented at La Biennale di Venezia 2011 and Manifesta 9, 2012 and his forthcoming solo show at Arnolfini, UK.

October 3rd 2012, Villa Romana, Florence, 6.30 PM
Public meeting with Allen S. Weiss

The borderline between "music", "sound" and "noise" is constantly shifting and historically determined, sometimes moving just slightly (as in the acceptance of new harmonic possibilities, or new timbres, within the tonal system), sometimes changing with seismic shifts (atonality, dodecaphony, musique concrète). It is also culturally specific. A case in point is Japanese art, organized according to the wabi-sabi aesthetic of the tea ceremony, existing already for half a millennium. Here, not only are mimetic and allusive effects highly codified, but the very staging of the ceremony entails a profound sense of the interrelation between all the arts.

To compare this aesthetic field with that of the West suggests a broader and more flexible way to imagine systems of representation, reconsidered according to varying degrees, types, and levels of similitude and difference, distinctness and allusiveness, recognizability and obscurity.

October 8th 2012, Villa Romana, Florence, 6.30 PM
Public meeting with Viv Corringham

Shadow-walks is an ongoing project that responds to people's relationship with familiar places. It involves three main activities: walking with others, listening, and improvised singing.

In Florence she'll be walking in the Rifredi/Statuto neighbourhood and her work will be realized with the support and collaboration of Fosca.

October 10th 2012 - Tempo Reale Festival at Museo Marino Marini, 9.30 PM
Singing in place - Viv Corringham's Performance

Singing in Place is a solo performance, using voice, electronics and environmental recordings. It combines live improvised singing with recordings made on walks in a variety of places, such as Ireland, London, and USA. These sound pieces integrate singing, narration and the sounds of the place. Singing in Place is co-produced by Radio Papesse and Tempo Reale.

October 29th 2012, Villa Romana, Firenze, ore 18.30 
Voicings - Public talk with Laura Malacart

The project Voicings was born to unveil the social and linguistic barriers, very often hidden in the process of another language acquisition: when people try to negotiate their new existence, to 'inhabit' a different language, to be in a different culture. In order to do that, Laura Malacart engages two groups of people who never meet: a group of migrants attending italian classes and a group of classically trained actors.

Since the first english stage of Voicings (2007-2009), the methodology has been updated on the occasion of Nuovi Paesaggi and specifically in the socio-linguistic context of Santa Croce sull'Arno (PI) where the artist has been working with a few groups of foreign speakers out of the more fifty diverse ethnic groups living in the area.

Voicings (Italy) is a work dealing with the socio-normative connotations of language, with the linguistic error, with the incompatibility and incongruity between the material body uttering or writing 'I' and the linguistic subject "I" who must confront and master the structure of a language in order to negotiate a new social sphere to belong to.

Together with the artist we will try to understand this gap, through both visual and aural devices, taking a clue from the notion of “ventriloquial objec”', recently developed by Laura Malacart in the article Voicings: a Ventriloquial Strategy to Politicise the Space Between Speaker and the Scripted Utterance published on The New Soundtrack journal (Edinburgh University Press).

Each talk is introduced and moderated by Lucia Farinati, Ilaria Gadenz and Carola Haupt.