The Pleiadi. Momenti diffusi di ascolto (Pleiades. Multi-listening Moments) sound archive is being hosted on the INBTWN – In Between website until 25 February 2022. This is an on- and off-line work based on listening practices specially designed by Standards, a collective project by Attila Faravelli, Enrico Gilardi, Michele Lori, Gaia Martino, Roberta Pagani and Nicola Ratti (www.standardstudio.it). The visual concept of the INBTWN website is the work of artist Lucrezia Di Carne, who has created a digital environment to house and archive visual and photographic tracks, recordings and transcripts of words and sounds.
INBTWN, the exhibition curated by Claudia D’Alonzo and dedicated to the relationship between bodies and technologies, focuses on sound for the 2021 edition with the aim of exploring dimensions of in-betweens with regard to corporeality and a sense of space. It also intends to carry out new ways of feeling through sound devices and practices to give words like distance, proximity, physicality, visibility, intangibility, collectivity, territory, participation and presence new semantic meaning. In the final long-lasting part of the pandemic, sound experience can be a vehicle through which the body can be restored to its role as an agent of knowledge and a source of connection to reality, both physical and online.
Standards, which focuses its research on sound and listening practices, is the protagonist of this edition. Through two residency periods, the collective developed a site-specific intervention designed for and found at Centrale Fies, intended as a place and an architectural body, a territory and a community of bodies inhabiting its spaces, transforming them through the cultural work and relationships that animate it.
Pleiadi. Momenti diffusi di ascolto cites a cloud full of stars, visible only out of the corner of one’s eye after searching through three different formats that are complementary in terms of duration and the space where they occurred: an online sound archive, from 20 December on the website of INBTWN; a performative sound installation conceived and presented on 22 December at Centrale Fies; and a score conceived as a series of instructions for listening exercises addressed both to the residents of Fies and future guests, to be performed in some of the indoor and outdoor spaces that Fies provides.
The project began with a residency at Centrale Fies that saw the active involvement of one of the many groups working at Fies: the internal staff consisting of Barbara Boninsegna, Marco Burchini, Maria Chemello, Lucrezia Di Carne, Vania Lorenzi, Dino Sommadossi, Virginia Sommadossi and Francesca Venezia, together with Filippo Andreatta, Fra De Isabella (Ubi Broki), Francesca Pennini and Maria Paola Zedda.
A collective performance in the form of an exercise allowed people to explore space through imperceptible sounds, minimal actions and subtle movements, experiencing with their own bodies what the care of listening to others involves. The listening-based polyphony of the people working at Fies resulted in the composition of a personal soundscape, where the amplification of sounds is intertwined with experiences and memories, positions of the body and the recording instrument, giving back a perception of space that is choral and, at the same time, heterogeneous, hybrid and multiform.
In mid-December, a second residence period was dedicated to the production of a performative sound installation resulting from this research and created specifically for the environment of the Forgia, where the continuous sound flow of the nearby water source processed in the hydroelectric power station reverberates. The sound intervention, based on the use of filtering and amplification systems, revealed several of the space’s acoustic features, interweaving the memory of the architectural body with that of the bodies present and the memory of those who live in Centrale Fies every day.
Finally, Standards has left Centrale Fies with a score, i.e. a set of instructions for simple listening exercises to be carried out at specific points in the Centrale. This last format of Pleiadi extends its temporality beyond the overall duration of the project and is addressed to both the residents of Fies and to future guests. This is a tool to train our attention skills at all times and gain access to an immediate sound dimension, resulting from the relationship of the bodies at Fies in action, both human and architectural.
INBTW
images: (cover 1)Lucrezia Di Carne, «Drawing for Pleiadi», 2021 (2) Standards, workshop, Centrale Fies, ph Roberta Segata, courtesy Centrale Fies (3) Standards – workshop, Centrale Fies – ph Roberta Segata courtesy Centrale Fies (4) Standards, ritratto (5)Lucrezia Di Carne, «Drawing for Pleiadi», 2021 (6) Standards, workshop, Centrale Fies, ph Roberta Segata courtesy Centrale Fies
