Alla mattina appena alzata #3

Transcription

Welcome, dear listeners, to this new broadcast on CANALE MILVA: a channel aimed at exploring the format of the sound exhibition by taking some gems of Italian music as starting points. Each song is chosen for you by Giada Olivotto and Camilla Paolino and explored together with visual artists invited to participate with a sound piece produced for the occasion.

This morning, we are happy to wish you a good awakening with the third sound exhibition of the column “Alla mattina appena alzata,” which, as you know by now, is dedicated to the version of the Italian song “Bella Ciao” sung by Milva for CANZONISSIMA in 1971. That is, the “Bella Ciao” sung by the Italian rice-workers who were employed in the rice fields of Piemonte and used to sing together, while working, in sign of protest against the exploitation of their labor force by their masters. The exhibition includes new sound productions by the Italian artist Alice Visentin, the French artist Camille Dumond, the Swiss artist Caroline Scattling Villeval and the duo of Swiss-based artists Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė. These new productions broaden the horizon outlined by the works proposed by the artists Lula Broglio, Joo Young Hwang, Rada Kozelj and Claire van Lubeek (in collaboration with Crowdpleaser), as well as by the works of Nicole Colombo, Lisa Lurati, Noemi Pfister, Sara Ravelli and Vera di Maus, who participated respectively in the first and second exhibition of the column and whom we warmly greet.

As with our previous sound exhibitions of the column “Alla mattina appena alzata” – whose participants have just been mentioned by Camilla – it will be Milva’s “Bella Ciao” that, once again, will serve as the starting point, or curatorial framework, for this new episode of the column. We would like to remind you that this sound exhibition is produced by CANALE MILVA for Lumpen Station. We leave you now to the sounds, noises and words composed for us by Alice Visentin, Camille Dumond, Caroline Scattling Villeval and the duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė. Enjoy your listening!

Let’s start our sound journey with Camille Dumond, a French artist based in Geneva who has composed the sound piece “Facing North (Sueded)” for this exhibition. In this piece, Camille Dumond uses a synthesizer to retrace the score sung in Hocket: a mesh of notes performed in 1991 by Meredith Monk and Robert Een at St. Mark’s Church in New York’s East Village. As part of the 1992 album “Facing North, Hocket” – as well as other pieces by the aforementioned American composer, director, singer and choreographer Meredith Monk – is a piece that explores wide vocal vistas, while emphasizing the contrast of its minimal musical textures. The a cappella piece becomes the plot of an adventure at dawn, synthesized by Camille Dumond, who explores the compositional landscapes of Monk’s original score freely inspired by the sounds of the Canadian countryside during the winter months. This is the glacial and generous context that recalls the notes sung by one performer to the other, building the final landscape of the melody through this mouth to mouth exchange. Flattened and immersed in a vague quagmire at first, from which a robotic voice then hovers, Camille Dumond’s “Facing North (Sueded)” allegorically reflects on the use of the figure of the explorer and weaver of musical landscapes within Monk’s work sound practice. Enjoy your listening!

⋆｡°✩ Camille Dumond, “Facing North (Sueded),” 5m22s ✩°｡⋆

We have just listened to “Facing North (Sueded)” by Camille Dumond, whom we thank again for having taken us with her on this sonic journey through the Canadian steppe, full of synthesizer-based synaesthetic visions. Let’s continue our path in a much more analogue – or should I even say organic – way, venturing into the mountains of Piemonte guided by the a cappella songs of “Montagna Canta,” the sound piece realized for us by Alice Visentin, in collaboration with the Piedmontese singer Amerigo Vigliermo, the singer Norma B. and the choir of which they are part. At the basis of this production is Alice’s research on the oral transmission of traditional Piedmontese songs, which, as Amerigo tells us, seems to be driven by the desire to enhance the legacy of mothers, aunts, grandmothers and other key female figures in their communities, who used to work a lot, recognized little or nothing, and did it while singing. Norma B.’s voice, supported by the vocals of her fellow choir members, closes the piece with the song “Casina Sola”: something that moved us and made our skin crawl for how poignant and beautiful it is.

⋆｡°✩ Alice Visentin, “Montagna Canta,” 10m ✩°｡⋆

Thanks to Alice Visentin, with Amerigo Vigliermo, Norma B. and all the voices of the choir for “Montagna Canta,” which we have just listened to. We would like to point out that the composition of “Montagna Canta” was made possible thanks to the Centro Etnologico Canavesano based in Via dei Ribelli in Bajo Dora, in the province of Turin, which we wish to thank. We now continue our listening with a song written and performed by Caroline Schattling Villeval, with the talking name “No kids, more coke!” (which has nothing to do with the most famous industrial carbonated soft drink in the world…). Caroline writes this song taking as a starting point her own experience of pregnancy, lived in close contact with social networks and with a number of applications designed specifically to accompany women during pregnancy. By providing biometric data and personal information in exchange for ad hoc advice and the ability to follow the development of the fetus through your smartphone (or rather, a digital projection of it), the body is put to work twice: as an increasingly calibrated and controlled hybrid means of re-production, where flesh and technology merge, and as a mine or inexhaustible source of information, data and knowledge. Here’s to you, “No kids, more coke!”

 ⋆｡°✩ Caroline Schattling Villeval, “No kids, more coke!,” 5m ✩°｡⋆

Thanks to Caroline Schattling Villeval for sharing with us her reflections on the experience of pregnancy through the eye and ear of social networks and apps. So we come to the last sound piece in our sound exhibition today, which was produced by the artistic duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė. Gawęda and Kulbokaitė sonically stage a part of “SULK,” a performance series of the same name, about the representation of the notion of “embodied text”: “SULK (Hamburg).” The piece is about the collapsing moment in which the relationship between reading and performance, in both physical and digital spaces, brings texts and their readers together. Drawing from a variety of authors, including Butler, Ahmed, Eliot, Morton, and Tokarczuk, the artists set to work constructing scripts for their performer-readers, with the intention of collapsing these textual fragments into a plural voice. The multiplicity expressed through “SULK (Hamburg)” projects us to several elements that reference its previous staging – and, notably, this sound piece was recorded during the performance “SULK 6” at the Kunstverein Hamburg as recently as November 2021, produced in collaboration with dj dodomundo and performers Karim Boumjimar, Justyna Chaberek, and Philipp Reinhardt. Enjoy!

 ⋆｡°✩ Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, “SULK (Hamburg),” 30m ✩°｡⋆

And with the sound piece by Dorota Gaweda and Egle Kulbokaite, whom we warmly thank for their participation, we conclude the third sound show of the column “Alla mattina appena alzata,” broadcasted on CANALE MILVA. Many thanks also to all the faithful listeners who have been following us since summer 2020.

We would like to thank once again Lumpen Station for their hospitality and Pro Helvetia, Pro Litteris and the Swiss Foundation for Radio and Culture (FSRC), as well as the emerging Locarno association Magica Opalini for supporting our sound project. As always we thank you for following us and we’ll be in touch soon with the next episode of CANALE MILVA which will be entirely dedicated to the artist Lara Damaso.

Closing song: ⋆｡°✩ Milva, “La filanda,” 1971 ✩°｡⋆