Embedded Files
Centocordo, 2011
The artwork is inspired by the Fascist-era transformation of the Bari coastline and relates to the unfinished portion of the government’s urbanization project, which anticipated using the port as a “colonial bridge” to the Arab world. The concept is based on the idea of subverting this colonial relation, rereading it from a perspective opposed to the actual historical dynamics. The aim is to construct an instrument of union between the different cultures by taking an element capable of physically going beyond these two worlds – the wind – and transforming it into a universal language: sound. Centocordo is a sound sculpture that evokes the image of a window, at once ideal and real, facing the Mediterranean. It has a double set of chords that are stretched between the front and back of the installation and played by the wind. The first set of chords, facing the sea, is tuned to the sequence of the Arab scale, while the second, facing the land, is tuned according to the principles of European harmonics.
Centocordo was hit by a storm in October 2011 that uprooted him from the rocks. To date it is still missing at sea.
Centocordo, 2011, wood, metal, nylon, 233 x 180 x 27 cm, installation view at Bari sea port, Bari
Torre Stormita, 2019
Torre Stormita is a project for the sounding of an architectural structure where sound sculptures with strings are arranged circularly inside the tower and are driven by the energy of the wind that sets them in vibration. Depending on the direction of the wind, a different section of the tower will resonate, spreading harmonies that propagate throughout the tower, which is transformed into a large sound box .
The sound that comes from the sea.
Emptied space, divided between clay and sand, the Tower of Bollita carries with it the trace of an ancient history populated by silent guardians. A defensive outpost, from here the Ionian Sea was scrutinized in a condition of action rather than passive listening, when - with the threat seen from the sea - a network of visual or acoustic signals were generated, warning of the imminent danger. The Tower of Bollita was a living space: the small military garrisons that guarded the place lived in a state of constant waiting, day and night. The inhabitant of the tower is, therefore, the attendant, the one who is predisposed to listen, to perceive a signal - be it visual or sound - in a dimension of immobility and silence. From this desire to rehabilitate listening as a new way of relating to space and time, the experience that the works of the Torre Stormita installation invite us to is that of waiting. In this place, it is in the condition of an attendant that a reflective attitude is nourished, predisposed to abstraction, and silence becomes relational, rather than absolute, in paying unconscious attention to the world that the artist is creating. With the auditory and imaginative practice that Nasini’s sculptures require, our condition of listening to and perceiving the environment also changes, because it is precisely through the sound form that new suggestions are created in the visitor. When the hissing of the wind takes on form in the sound works, the encounter of the air with these organisms shapes new channels of communication between outside and inside. The internal spaces of the Tower as vibrant cavities are arranged to resonate; while the external spaces become closer and the loose time, perceived as a drive, follows the birth of a new and fragile sound, entrusted to the imponderability of the wind and the natural elements of the surrounding landscape.
Nicoletta Guglielmucci
Campo Sintonico, 2019
Campo Sintonico is a permanent installation composed of four sound sculptures in corten steel arranged to form an acoustic perimeter, within the forest of the Nature Reserve of Lake Vico. The sound is generated by exploiting the acoustic phenomenon of the excitation of strings stretched on sound boxes by the moving air. The frequencies emitted by these sculptures express a sound set by man but managed by the unpredictability of the natural element, giving back a harmonic and at the same time alien sound. The ambiguity of this acoustics form has its expressive potential in the ability to be able to evoke in a way that can be associated with the musical experience, maintaining a deeply distant and elusive behavior in total detachment from human possibilities. The listening experience of these sound objects is strongly influenced by the environmental context: the absence of wind, silence, with the arrival of the currents produces a sound that has no beginning but rises from the inaudible frequencies, returning an experience of a contemplative nature where space, from a simple place, is transformed into a generator of sound, as it is the morphological characteristics of the terrain that define the course of the winds.
Cocomerophono, 2014
Centocordo, 2015
The Sudden Gust, 2014
This edition, composed of a vinyl and eight large-format prints, collects part of the work that Matteo Nasini has developed over the last four years in relation to “aeolian sound” – the sound that is produced when a system of strings, applied to a sound box, is made to vibrate by the wind. Rather than simply documenting it, The Sudden Gust fixes the incorporeal dimension of the encounter between wind and sound in the form of an object. Matteo Nasini often designs his aeolian interventions in vibrant spaces, where the environmental and atmospheric conditions, the interference noise, the position of the listener, the unpredictability of the wind, and the visual and plastic qualities of the objects themselves constitute, in their entirety, an articulated experience. With this edition, Matteo Nasini re-elaborates that same kind of experience by means of a vinyl and a series of visual compositions. The recordings contained in the vinyl are traces of concrete events: throughout the years, the artist has recorded his “sound objects” in several places and in different conditions. The wind does not follow constant trends, directions or intensities; an aeolian instrument never plays the same way twice; and the soundscapes, which consist also of background noises, change constantly. The aeolian sound cannot be written, directed and performed by a person. Yet this is not merely a loss of control: beyond its randomness, what is relevant in the work of Matteo Nasini is the non-human dimension. The artist’s role tends toward an act of containment: wind instruments are the knot through which the invisible force of the wind merges with the artistic intervention. Once on the vinyl, this sound stretches out with precision, in an articulate and detailed way, filling that emptiness which we call “musical experience.” With its unpredictable and alien flow, the aeolian sound foregrounds the need to listen, but also its profound inessentiality. The recordings of Matteo Nasini’s instruments produce at once a sense of lack and of completeness: the fullness of the musical experience, the elusiveness of the symbolic/expressive element. The images that make up the prints in The Sudden Gust likewise constitute a reflection on the invisible and incorporeal nature of the aeolian experience. Geometric structures, inspired by the geometry of the instruments themselves and by a certain tradition of musical scoring, intertwine with photos that, just like wind and sound, seem almost to disappear. More than ethereal, these images are opaque. They are veils of themselves, and, just like the sounds, they stand as a sort of trace of repressed, universal memory. The sounds recorded in this edition are neither more nor less than discrete events in a potentially infinite flow: everything happens even in the total absence of an informed interpretation. The listener is there, but he may as well not be. In a sense, the aeolian sound is one that has no beginning and no end. It is significant because it is always other.
Valerio Mannucci
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