ITALIAN ART TO BE LISTENED TO

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2001 REPORT TO THE NATION

Mono audio, lenght 6 min.
Sound design: Walter Paradiso
On occasion of the project Arte italiana all’ascolto (Italian art listening)
NCCA – National Centre for Contemporary Arts
Moscow, May 16 – June 5, 2011

THE EXHIBITION

The project ITALIAN ART TO BE LISTENED TO aims to put in evidence the presence of sound through the last three generations of Italian artists. Sound it’s a totally new matter, less obvious and striking than the visual aspects, but much more experimental and thus exciting.

Sound will be explored from different points of view, both from artists coming from the visual arts as from artists coming from the world of sound, thus demonstrating its inherent and essential characteristic of exploding the traditional boundaries between artistic disciplines.
Sound pieces of Italian artists from different generations and backgrounds will be “put on stage”: eighteen amplifiers, each for every audio work, will be dislocated in the big exhibition space of NCCA inviting the audience to a sort of “promenade” created by
a game of rebounding in which, as a theatrical action, three generations of Italian artists confront themselves and dialogue through very different audio works, ultimately building a totally new sound composition made of words, voice, music, noise…
The exhibition will realize so a new experiment in the visual and the sound arts, introducing a new concept for the art of exhibition.

THE ARTWORK

My contribution to the radio programme “Radioarte” of September 30, 2001, was recorded the day after the American President George W. Bush made his speech (gone down in history as Report to the Nation of September 29 2001) live from the radio studio of the White House. My family name is “Pirri”. In Jerusalem someone suggested its origin: los perros, the dogs, that is the infidel jews chased out by the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 and landed in Italy passing through Sardinia. In his speeches to the Americans during the wars in Iraq, President Bush often said that he intended to lead a religious battle supporting faith and against infidels. This work was realized live from a kennel in Cosenza. I wanted to compare and contrast the President’s faith in his broadcast voice (and in his power of convincing) with the voice of the ones who gave me my name: the Dogs, los Perros, the Infidels.