Splendore Neolitico

Neolithic Sunshine is an investigation into the extinct sounds and harmonies of our world. Imagining what mankind’s first instruments might have looked like, the pierced bones of extinct animals whose origin dates back around forty thousand years, the artist has selected from Italian and foreign Natural History museum collections, fossil remains dating back to the Pleistocene, which he then scanned and reproduced using the 3D printing process. Tusks, horns and bones of prehistoric animals are thus once again transformed into polished white ceramic tools, whose intrinsic evocative power recalls a mythical and ancestral imagery. The project was presented in 2018 in the solo exhibition Neolithic Sunshine curated by Marcello Smarrelli at the Fondazione Arti Visive Pescheria, Pesaro. 

“The installation ‘Neolithic Sunshine’, realised in the Suffragio Church, is a sound piece composed by the artist, performed by an ensemble of musicians using the instruments/ sculpture and diffused in space with a system that follows the circular shape of the building. The piece, on the one hand proposes an attempt at evoking primordial sounds, on the other hand it allows us to listen to the extinct and unheard sounds of these millennial fossils. The instruments stand on a podium in the centre of the dodecagonal hall - as if they had been deposited after a musical performance - surrounded by a structure made of woollen threads, entitled ‘Tenda vestigia’. 

It is an installation monumental and at the same time ephemeral, which with its coloured lines defines a metastasis capable of connecting interior and exterior: the bundle of threads, in fact, starts at the Liceo Artistico Mengaroni, in front of the Pescheria Visual Arts Centre, crosses the Piazza della Creatività and penetrates the Chiesa del Suffragio, creating a sign in the urban context that underlines the ideal relationship between the three architectural spaces. In line with the display in the Suffragio Church, the ‘Lost Garden’, the installation that occupies part of the part of the Loggiato della Pescheria, creates a golden chromatic environment, suggested by the presence of elements charged with primordial energy and referable to the evocative idea of the find. Primordial energy and traceable to the evocative idea of the find. A series of more than twenty sculptures, also made from wool, scattered along the nave, refer to the remains of a non-existent architecture, columns that support nothing, but- as with ‘Tenda vestigia’ - they refer to a ritual and fantastic space. As an ideal epicentre of the energy generated by the works in the exhibition, Nasini has placed, again in the Loggiato della Pescheria, ‘Wheel’, a large ceramic ring that recalls the archetypal forms of prehistoric architecture and the first tools created by man. Finally, acting as an ideal backdrop to the various exhibition episodes, we find ‘Principio Selvatico’, a tapestry hand-embroidered large-scale tapestry: a view, a glimpse, a primitive passage, a lush and wild scenery in vivid and wild scenery with vivid and disturbing colours.” 

Experimenting today with the musical potential of these archaic sound objects whose original melody has been irretrievably lost, the artist has developed a performance centred on the dynamics linked to the origin of sound, its form before being translated into harmonies, its civilising function in the first human communities, the imitation of natural and animal sounds, and the extraordinary idea in which in an indefinite place and time man invented music. “Whenever the genesis of the world is described with sufficient precision, an acoustic element intervenes at the decisive moment of action. At the instant when a god manifests the will to give life to himself or to another god, to make heaven and earth or man appear, he emits a sound. He exhales, sighs, speaks, sings, shouts, coughs, expiates, sobs, vomits, thunders, or plays a musical instrument. The source from which the world emanates is always an acoustic source.” Marius Schneider from The Primitive Music.

The first performance was presented by an ensemble of five in 2019 at the Auditorium in Rome curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi, in the same year a second live performance in the spaces of the abbey of Fontfroide, commissioned by MRAC Occitanie - InSitu curated by Emmanuelle Luciani. Technological innovation today allows us to look at the past in a futuristic way, it makes possible the manifestation of lost phenomena. In the performance, the return of this ancestral inevitably mixes with the musicians’ interpretation and, in this necessary exchange, time unravels in a non-linear way, restoring a sense of communion between distant eras and humanity. The coexistence within the project of different present, as the research progressed, was further developed through the inclusion, among the ancestral acoustic sounds, of electronic elements. Sound experimentation in this sense gave rise to new performances, with an ensemble of eight performers, presented in the summer of 2023. The first took place at Città dell’arte - Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella in the context of the exhibition The Golden Age curated by Gabi Scardi. Subsequently, the ensemble performed in the gardens of Villa Medici in Rome on the occasion of the Nuit des Cabanes curated by IUNO and Caroline Courrioux. Splendore Neolitico at Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, 25th June 2023 Splendore Neolitico at Nuite de Cabanes, Villa Medici, Rome, 27th June 2023 During Volcanic attitude - Festival of contemporary culture, curated by Cose Cosmiche, the performance moved within the special setting of the island of Vulcano. Preceded by a walk on the sunny path to the volcano, the performance took place at the top of the crater. This evocative and inhospitable location amplified the content of the performance by evoking the same primordial times recalled by the unheard sounds of fossils. 

Splendore Neolitico ensemble: 

Damiano Tata, Giuliana Paolino, Nicola Miele, Tanvi Shaha, Francesco Angelucci, Gabriele Pigazzini, Adriano Deritis, Matteo Nasini, Luca Famiglietti, Federico Proietti