La Sete e l’Orecchio, a diffuse festival articulated in artistic residencies, workshops and live performances, makes a stage on 3 December at the Castromediano Museum in Lecce, with performances by Rossella Biscotti and Attila Faravelli, the dancer Marta Bellu and concerts by the Bellows duo and the Blutwurst ensemble, the soundtrack of the Canti Magnetici collective.
The project, which started last 17 September at KORA- Centro del Contemporaneo with live performances by Mike Cooper, Francesco Fonassi and Giulio Colangelo, and with the residency and workshop of the dancer Marta Bellu, aims to explore the different declinations that water can take on in its different physical, symbolic and spiritual states.
A festival conceived with a view to multidisciplinarity in a constant dialogue between ancient and contemporary
that reinterprets and encourages the rediscovery of the culture of water in popular tradition, envisages the
participation of artists whose research ranges across areas such as contemporary and electronic music, performance, dance, contaminating themselves with ecology, anthropology and history.
THE GENESIS OF THE PROJECT
The particular configuration of the terrain of Castrignano allowed rainwater to flow into several places in the village through a system of underground caves, canals and wells that, for centuries, have favoured the form -and protection of a water heritage that was fundamental for carrying out, in particular, the agricultural activities. Mostly underground and therefore not visible, this network reveals itself in some of the key places of the country,
often meeting places or places of worship that have defined the identitỳ of the town and its population over time: the Parco delle Pozzelle, within which there are around one hundred underground reservoirs (fréata in the Griko language) used to collect rainwater, the natural pond of the ancient Masseria Pozzelle, the Baronial Castle, into whose cisterns much of the rainwater was channelled that then stagnated in the moat, the Byzantine Crypt of Sant’Onofrio, the church of Santa Maria delle Pozzelle. The theme of water is also a recurring element in the collections of the Sigismondo Castromediano Archaeological Museum in Lecce. The pole, a hub of material evidence of Salento’s history from prehistory to the present day, with its collections from the numerous Salento coastal caves, primitive landings since prehistoric times on the already frequented Mediterranean routes, is committed to making the finds from all the underwater archaeological sites near the coast, of which Apulia itself and the entire Adriatic are particularly rich.
Already partners in the Fluxo project, produced by Arthub and presented in the Pirelli HangarBicocca spaces last November, the Ramdom Cultural Institute and the Castromediano Museum in Lecce with La Sete e L’Orecchio, renew their collaboration in the field of cultural production.
Bio and Set:
Bellows
Undercurrent
Acousmatic sound, fractal beats, ghostly melodies, analogue electronics and tapes are the elements that make up the imprint of the duo composed of Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti. Often halfway between technical electroacoustic technique and beat-based production, Bellows’ music obliquely recalls aspects of hip-hop dub and techno, twisting their rhythmic bases. The duo presents their latest work, Undercurrent, a suite of minimalist pieces that often linger for minutes on repeated single events. Guitar, drum and synthesiser recordings cut into tape loops and used as the basis for long tracks, each of which moves around a reiterated central motif that shifts over time to bring out multitudes of details and subtle shifts in tone, texture and rhythm.
Magnetic Songs
O and bukura More
Collective and record label, Canti Magnetici encourages a dialogue between musicians, sound artists, documentarists and researchers whose common ground of investigation is nature, the human being, tradition, new technologies and the sense of the fantastic. To date, Canti Magnetici has produced 37 publications, organised tours and group performances of artists from its catalogue. Its works have been presented in festivals, art galleries and unconventional spaces. The collective is regularly engaged in concerts, lectures, guided listening and workshops; it collaborates with art foundations, museums, associations and radio broadcasts; it works for theatre, cinema and dance.
O e bukura More is a selection of songs for voice only (from solo singing, to choral, polyphonic or unison performances, to recitations) that spread within the spaces of the Castromediano Museum will evoke the history of encounters and crossings between the peoples of southern Italy and those of Greece, Albania and north-east Africa. Stories of dominations, forced displacements, painful abandonments, but also testimonies of integration, mutual enrichment, the birth of mestizo cultures, of traditions that intersect and become new traditions.
Marta Bellu
Iride
Liquid Geometries, Crystalline Dances
Dancer and psychologist, researcher of body and mind, she is interested in awareness and expression practices involving the mind-body system in an artistic, evolutionary and social sense. Since 2014 she has been involved in choreographic research in dialogue with language and musical composition, which she continues with Donato Epiro and Andrea Sanson, investigating the relationship between body, sound and light, as Collettivo Trifoglio.
Ìride is an investigation into the liquidity of language within the perforated space of reflection, generated
by the encounter of water with form. The reflection can only be seen, it exists nowhere else, it is pure light,
it dwells in the liquid surface between material and immaterial, it is generated by the gaze but is also what is looked at. It is therefore a multiplier of worlds and planes of the real, made of solid appearances and dissolved images. Liquid geometries, crystalline dances. Ìride investigates in performance a liquid medium between the eye, the vision and the gaze in the dual dimension of subject and landscape. The landscape is the part of the territory that one embraces with one’s gaze from a given point. The dance of the gaze is the very creation of the landscape in a relationship of mutual reflection with the space it inhabits and with the beholder. The true eye of the earth is water. Are not our eyes an unexplored pool of liquid light at the bottom of each of us? The lake, the pond, the stagnant water, is a great serene eye, it absorbs all light and makes a world of it. Water empties the beholder into what is looked at.
Blutwurst
Blutwurst meets Walter Marchetti + Marja Ahti
The ensemble 𝐵𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑤𝑢𝑟𝑠𝑡 was founded in Florence in 2011 by musicians from the fields of contemporary music
contemporary music and radical improvisation. The founding members are Marco Baldini (trumpet), Edoardo Ricci
(bass clarinet, saxophone) and Daniela Fantechi (piano, accordion). The ensemble has grown since 2012 with Michele Lanzini (cello), Cristina Abati (viola), Maurizio Costantini (double bass) and Luisa Santacesaria (piano, harmonium). In the first phase, Blutwurst focused on improvisation and the study and realisation of open and graphic scores by composers such as John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Cornelius Cardew, Alvin Lucier and La Monte Young. The ensemble then began working on their own compositions, focusing their research on the acoustic exploration of sustained tones and slow variations of sound patterns. He has released records for Real Time, Negative Days, Another Timbre and Kohlhaas.
In its set, presented for the first time at La Sete e l’Orecchio, the ensemble Blutwurst pays tribute to the
composer Walter Marchetti (1931-2015) with a reinterpretation of the works Ailanthus (1964) and Op. 35 / Musica piramidale (1962), which for the occasion are put in relation with an expanded version for acoustic instruments only ofFluctuating Stream (2020), an electroacoustic piece by Swedish-Finnish composer Marja Ahti (1981).
Attila Faravelli & Rossella Biscotti
Amphoric
Attila Faravelli is a sound artist and field recordist. With his practice he explores the relationships between sound, space and body. He is the founder and curator of Aural Tools, a series of multiple sound objects that document the very processes of sound production by selected musicians. His record works are published by Senufo Editions, Die Schachtel, Presto!?, Baloon & Needle, Mikroton Recordings. She has presented her work at various university and art institutions in Europe, the USA, China and South Korea.
Rossella Biscotti, was born in Italy and currently lives and works between Amsterdam and Brussels. In the course of
her career she has dealt with present and past history, exploring the collective value of events that are sometimes dramatic, but always dense. Her work spans installation, sculpture, performance, sound works and filmmaking. The result of extensive research processes, personal encounters, interdisciplinary collaborations and interrogations of places and stories, his meticulous layering of materials and meanings and delve deep into the history of Italy, from antiquity to the present. of Italy, from antiquity to the leaden years.
The Amphoric installation consists of a series of amphorae recovered from various marine archaeological excavations, belonging to the collection of the Sigismondo Castromediano Museum in Lecce, whose resonance is amplified through microphones placed inside them, and a performance in which recordings made on the coasts of Malta and in the central Mediterranean Sea on board the merchant ship Diligence during the performance The Journey (20-23 May 2021) are superimposed and mixed. The Nagra III tape recorder used for this project has a way of rendering sound in a precise, harmonically rich and grainy manner. The amphorae, which lay on the seabed for 2000 years, are composed of a complex sedimentation of shells, limestone and salt: in a sense, the sea contributed to their creation as much as the craftsmen who originally formed them from clay. Their sound possibilities have been explored in the same way as one explores a physical space.
THE RESIDENCES
The artists in residence are sound artist and musician Attila Faravelli and the collective Canti Magnetici. The artists will be invited to relate with the places of Castrignano de’ Greci, starting with the historic Parco delle Pozzelle, and with the spaces and collection of the Sigismondo Castromediano Museum in Lecce, to investigate their physical and architectural characteristics and explore their sonic qualities.
THE LABORATORIES
Attila Faravelli / AURAL TOOLS
Aural Tools consists of a series of simple sound objects, the purpose of which is to document the work of some
musicians not through the release of records (CDs, cassettes or vinyls) but rather by investigating ways and processes (both material and conceptual) through which sound is produced. Each device activates a specific relationship between body and space, making explicit the material and energy flows within which we are immersed. The Aural Tools are instruments that are easy to use by anyone, and are designed in such a way that they can be used both actively and passively; the user listens to himself in the very act of producing sound within a specific context.
A project curated by Ramdom with the artistic direction of Donato Epiro, in collaboration with the Castromediano Museum of Lecce and the Municipality of Castrignano de’ Greci.
The programme is supported by the FUS – Fondo Unico dello Spettacolo del Ministero della Cultura – Progetti
Special Projects 2022′.
Info: info@k-ora.it
tel: 366 3199532
press: com@ramdom.net
