Music and Documentary

Sound installation

Curated by Avant-dernières pensées, the sound installation seeks to create an ideal match between the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the music of Arvo Pärt.

Just as Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects seem to suggest the possibility of observing reality – consisting of spaces, architectures, shapes and lights – with eyes that are already refreshed while waiting, Arvo Pärt’s music similarly seeks hearing every sound with a new spirit, even before the note itself is played.

“A composer must often wait a long time for his music, it is like sublime anticipation”, Pärt said when, after a long period of reflection on his relationship with experimentation, he imagined a compositional language that tends towards the essence of Western music, towards an ideal of simplicity and purity.

In tintinnabuli style (with a tintinnabulum and bell), two voices – one melodic and the other based on the notes of the triad of a chord – oscillate between consonance and dissonance, composing a monad in which “one plus one equals one”. Thanks to a never-before-seen quadrophony playback system specially made in each room, the sound installation reconstructs this dual unit through the distribution of the different sound flows in space, in a perceptual dimension in which music is a relationship with the place and passage, over time, from project to sound.

“Everything that is superfluous must be left aside”, Pärt said, to “focus on every single sound, so that every blade of grass will be as important as a flower”.

Arvo Pärt frees music from the need to listen by offering sound to silence, just as Christo and Jeanne-Claude subtract the work of art from sight, restoring form to the invisible. Veiling is unveiling.

Hiding becomes a gesture of love.

Like being silent.

Documentaries

An essential part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects is the documentation of the processes that accompanied them. Destined to disappear after a few days, the works belong to the collective memory also thanks to the photographs and films created as testimonies of their conception and creation.

The images and videos in the exhibition aim to complete the experience, tracing an ideal counterpoint consisting of landscapes, expectations, faces, voices and stories.

Sala 3 – Pannello testo 140×70

You are listening to Für Alina (1976): a small and significant work which bears the indication “Ruhig, erhaben, in sich hineinhorchend” (Calm, sublime, listening to himself).

Sala 5 – Pannello testo

You are listening to Spiegel im Spiegel (1978): according to the composer, it is like “returning home after being away”.

Storica 1 – Pannello testo

You are listening to Silentium, second movement of Tabula rasa (1977): Scive Pärt: “If someone approaches silence with love, then this can give life“.