Massimo Bartolini: Due qui / To Hear. Italian Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024

Massimo Bartolini: Due qui / To Hear. Italian Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 17, 2024.
Official description: Designed with two entrances, the exhibition Due qui/To Hear — presented with support from the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity — moves through three spaces built around various acoustic experiences and meeting points, suggesting the highly relational nature of sound. Visitors can enter an almost empty room where they are welcomed by a small sculpture of a Pensive Bodhisattva, a Buddhist figure who prefers thought to action. The drone of an organ pipe creates a sense of frozen time, a space of waiting. In the central room, a large scaffolding of pipes has been transformed into an organ playing a melody composed by Caterina Barbieri and Kali Malone. Visitors can walk through and sit down on a circular bench. At its centre is a pool where a wave constantly rises and falls, prompting a form of meditation, even a trance state. Coming out into the garden, they can listen to two stories about the cycle of birth/death (and regeneration): that of a tree (by Nicoletta Costa) and that of a human being (by Tiziano Scarpa). Further on, they will also hear a choral work (by Gavin Bryars). Hanging in the branches of a tree, these voices sing of a person who feels roots growing through him. They pin him down, but also bring him closer to others, to the Whole...