«It is easier to write about what is outside and not about what is inside: what is outside is described, what is inside is only poetry, and you don’t see it, nor can it come on command»: we are outside Massimo Bartolini and I, in the Garden of the Virgins, surrounded by the acoustic suggestion of a choir for three voices, bells and vibraphone, which Gavin Bryarstogether with his son Yurihe composed inspired by a poem by Roberto Juarroz in which a human being perceives himself as a tree connected to the world, by osmotic relationship, through roots. Here, where I can describe, three pairs of speakers are hanging, almost invisible, from the branches of three trees and broadcast three tracks of this composition suggesting possible relationships with the environment – relationships, one might say, that require something extra, that they are capable of casting a different, alternative, even dynamic gaze on the present and the prospects of the future in order to overcome the modern paradigm of a nature opposed to culture.
It is not obligatory to start from the garden, on the contrary, Two Here/To Hearwhich openly plays on the assonance between two here (two here) e to hear (to feel, to hear), was conceived by Bartolini and the curator, Luca Cerizza, like an itinerary that does not impose any direction but leaves full faculty of movement to every subjectivity which, as such, enjoys the potential to expand, to cross, to transgress, to connect and to infect, breaking hierarchies, and therefore borders and again conflicts. If you choose to enter from Tesa 2, which overlooks the Arsenale and which can still be described, the focal point, main reference of an environment – sound – designed to welcome is the long white column, 25 meters long, placed on the ground and containing a motor inside which, by moving the air, produces a sound. This sound, prolonged, is an A flat and finds correspondence – according to the theory of chroma applied to musical tones – in the purple color of one of the walls of the body, to which the green, representative of the A (according to the attribution Of Alexander Scriabin).
At the beginning of this column a small statue depicts the Pensive Bodhisattva, that is, a man who has achieved enlightenment and renounces it to show the way to other men. These men can, if we want, be us, and the way towards the beating heart of the pavilion is that of “listening”: “In listening, which is a form of inaction, the ego, the presupposition of differentiations and delimitations. the Ego that listens is immersed in the whole, in the unlimited, in the infinite”, states Cerizza quoting Byung Chul Han.
Although it is, perhaps too human, to ask ourselves on the threshold of Tesa 1 what we will see, the answer is not so obvious because it depends exclusively on our feelings. Say that Two here it is the largest structure made of innocent tubes that Bartolini has ever created or that it is a scaffolding that does not produce architecture but sounds or, again, that it is the result of a sophisticated engineering and musical work that refers to baroque sound machines and recalls the design of an imaginary baroque garden is not enough. It is labyrinthine, it is true, it is provisional, it is equally true, and it has no claim to personality, and it is precisely this aspiration to the impersonal that overturns every possible prediction because instead of seeing something we do not see at all but we listen and, listening with our ears tense, we move, we get lost, we rely and in the end, subjectively, we will have built our path, our composition, without seeing each other – which in times of exposure like the current ones, leaves the fateful question unanswered, “what do you see ?”, in favor – again, and then – of the possibility of surprising oneself.
Is it subjective? Absolutely yes. Is this unheard of? Equally, because it invites us to let go and trust, entrusting ourselves to what we feel as we move or sit around a similar fountain where we can also contemplate the perpetual motion of a conical wave: music – a composition naturally spatialized within the body by means of of two large music boxes (Mutivette) and wooden organ pipes, written by Caterina Barbieri And Kali Malone – or «a language that everyone hears and, to speak together, through it, you just need to listen». Romantic, right? – with reference to those characters of romanticism inclined more to the suggestions of feeling rather than to a rational and practical conception.
Tags: Italian Pavilion Massimo Bartolini
