XII edition

MacGuffin – The Life of Things is a Dutch editorial project. In themed magazines, presentations, and podcasts, MacGuffin examines the objects around us and uses them as a starting point to explore the historical, social, and political aspects they represent. As with the MacGuffins in Hitchcock’s films, the objects are not the main characters, but plot devices that set the story in motion. The strongly interdisciplinary approach that the curators, Kirsten Algera and Ernst van der Hoeven, propose is able to explore and put into perspective the main philosophical, social, and political theories of our time.

To explore the topic in the publishing field, the Festival hosted the installation Chain chain chain, dedicated to the new issue The Chain focused on the object of the chain. From hip-hop jewellery to resistance movements, from new slavery to blockchain technologies, the work explores our complex relationship with the chain and its contrasting characteristics of connection, decoration, and constraint. The eight posters that compose the installation represent a selection of key images and articles from the eleventh issue that can be removed and taken home by the visitor, creating in their turn a chain of relationships. Along with the installation, the room also featured a podcast corner where visitors could listen to the 2Chains podcast series created by researchers and curators Alix de Massiac and Alex Furtado Melville.

Ph. 1 MacGuffin, Chain chain chain, installation view. Video Sound Art Festival XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Anna D’Amore
Ph. 2 The Chain issue #11
Ph. 3 MacGuffin, Chain chain chain, installation view. Video Sound Art Festival XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Yesuqi Lin

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Sacks of pearls, inflatable toys, plastic flowers, and sizzling frying pans, Mika Rottenberg’s film installations explore the relationships between immaterial goods and manufactured products and blur the line between reality and fiction. 

Cosmic Generator by artist Mika Rottenberg is a video work that establishes a connection between various places and actors, including Calexico (California), Mexicali (Mexico) and Yiwu (China), to recreate the imaginary life of an object, from its production in a factory to the moment it is sold.
The film, whose title is a reference to the engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), highlights the absurdity of our human condition and systems of production and circulation. The artist relates footage from a restaurant and a Calexico shop to a huge plastic market in Yiwu, China. The  tunnel system suggests a reflection on how certain objects are allowed to circulate freely in the world, while for others, traveling a distance of a few meters can be a long and complex process.
The tiredness displayed by some of the female protagonists is also a reference to sleep as a temporary means of retreat and as one of the few remaining bodily resources that cannot be exploited. 

Watch the Mika Rottenberg interview

Letizia Cariello (LETIA)’s research is aimed at mending connections and relationships between materials and spaces. Her sign crosses everyday objects to reconstruct perceptive echoes and materialize time in a perceptible form.

For the 12th edition of the Festival, the artist presented a complex installation consisting of the video work Con te and the sculptural element L’ombra mia mi ha fatto paura. Con te is a sequence of 21 videos shot by the artist in the Piedmont countryside. They depict green wheat being moved by the wind. The installation forces the spectator to raise their head, turning into a tunnel. The light sound of the wind moving the wheat reaches the visitor, as if they were swimming through them. The disorientation is not an expedient to produce discomfort, but a system for the observer’s body to lose its mental awareness by accessing another type of gravity and physical experience. L’ombra mia mi ha fatto paura is the title of the fabric sculpture with a calendar written on it. A symbol of instability, the tent, which belongs to nomadic culture, is a kind of refuge. The work is inspired by the cabins in Travemünde on the North Sea described by Thomas Mann. 

Ph. 1 Letizia Cariello (LETIA), Con te, 2021, video, 6′. Installation view, Video Sound Art XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Francesca Ferrari
Ph. 2 Letizia Cariello (LETIA), L’ombra mia mi ha fatto paura, bamboo parasol with booth covered with sheet and black ink writing on iron stand designed by the artist, 2001-2022. Installation view, Video Sound Art XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Francesca Ferrari
Ph. 3 Letizia Cariello (LETIA), L’ombra mia mi ha fatto paura, bamboo parasol with booth covered with sheet and black ink writing on iron stand designed by the artist, 2001-2022. Ph. Clelia Ricci

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Caterina Morigi revisits man’s traces embedded in the dull materiality of rock engravings in a contemporary key. The sculptural series Making Special condenses the characteristics of human errors with the imperfections of machines and the uncertainty of interpretation, subverting  the forms of the ancient to bring them into the present.
I would like to read the works with the ‘Jungian’ method, through the symbol that is always linked to human interiority. I start with the labyrinth, an abstract concept that largely captures our timeless interest. In the myths of antiquity, it is believed that some were built to deceive demons and that the labyrinth had an attractive capacity. In other cases, ancestral, circular or elliptical representations are thought to have mirrored astral movements, complementary to earthly labyrinths, symbolizing the loss of orientation, to defend and find (one’s) center. For Jung, the sun is the symbol of the self and identity; for the Egyptian civilisation it was personified by Oro, the son of Isis and Osiris. The sun rejoins the labyrinth because, according to Eliade, it represents the generating and unifying rotational movement.
The Making Special series was realised in collaboration with Ultravioletto and the company Masutti Marmi. The title picks up on the theories of anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake, who argues that the artist, like human and animal mothers, has been involved in sacred rituals since prehistoric times, tending to make ordinary things special.

Ph. 1 Caterina Morigi, Making Special, soli, 2022, Marmo Azul Bahia, engraving, 43 x 50 x 2 cm. Produced in collaboration with Ultravioletto.art and Masutti marmi. Installation view, Video Sound Art Festival XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Francesca Ferrari. 
Ph. 2 Caterina Morigi, Making Special, soli, 2022, Marmo Azul Bahia, engraving, 43 x 50 x 2 cm. Produced in collaboration with Ultravioletto.art and Masutti marmi. Installation view, Video Sound Art Festival XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Anna D’Amore
Ph. 3 Caterina Morigi, Making Special, labirinti, 2022, starlight sapphire quartz, brown gold quartz, engraving and inlay, 37 x 77 x 2 cm. Produced in collaboration with Ultravioletto.art and Masutti marmi. Installation view, Video Sound Art Festival XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Alessandro Baldeschi

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The artist Oli Bonzanigo presents a new installation that mixes a unison of voices with a single emitting body and a helium balloon, which is blocked in its movement to generate a moment of contemplation. Starting from Naum Gabo’s concept of ‘stereometric transparency’, the artist has initiated an investigation into the transformation of solids into light forms.
The sound work is the focus of the installation: it is an archive containing recordings made by the artist since 2008 across different continents. Barroom chats, people at parties, gatherings in the square, demonstrations, thunderstorms on boats, prayers, backyard voices, children’s screams, encounters in the desert, streets and squares full of life. Voices in the courtyard, outside the theatre, almost in the street. We can see the counterweight of gravity, the lightness of air.

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Displayed on a decomposable LED screen, circulação, from 2019 still in progress, presents a collection of footage given to the artist by companies carrying out inspections for multinationals active in natural resource extraction and telecommunications. The neutrality of the content is only apparent: the images show the relentless commodification of the landscape.
The sculptural works are made out of recycled materials from different environments: electric cables, antenna components, fulgurites (fossils originating from lightning). For the sound intervention, the artist also uses existing material or material obtained through the practice of negotiation: sound fragments from the autotune software and sounds from companies that collect data for the oil extraction industry.
Autotune is software used in pop music to correct pitch, an example being the song Believe by Cher. It was invented by Andy Hildebrand, a scientist who, at the time, worked for ExxonMobil, collecting seismic data in order to locate oil deposits underground. To obtain data on the location of new deposits, the oil industry transmits sonic waves that bounce back to their origin. The data gathered is analyzed in an attempt to determine the composition of the ground.
It is from these assumptions that Andy Hildebrand – amateur flutist – creates Autotune. Daniel de Paula’s new work, through negotiation and observation, shows a system of control in which the production and exchange of goods are at the centre, even of the software used to create pop songs.

Ph. 1-3 Daniel de Paula, power-flow, 2021, fulgurite, subterranean data cables, high-frequency antenna mounting bracket and aluminum zip ties. Installation view, Video Sound Art XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Francesca Ferrari
Ph. 2 Daniel de Paula, circulação, 2019, video-negotiation. Installation view, Video Sound Art XII edition, Teatro Carcano, Milan, 2022. Ph. Yesuqi Lin

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In Feeling Thing by London-based Candoco Dance Company and artist Jo Bannon, three performers establish an intimate dialogue with an object: a ladder, a fan, a hoover. The accompaniment is provided by ASMR – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response – that is the sensation of relaxing tingling in the back of the head when actions such as whispering, hair brushing, scratching and hitting are heard or experienced. The viewer is thus invited to immerse themselves in a sensory, illogical and disturbing space in which all things are alive.

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Three oranges trace the delicate passage of three young women into adulthood through a metaphorical narration of their present condition and their projections into the future. In an intimate feminine journey between high and low tides, turbulence and contradictions, calm and turmoil, Fresh oranges into the ocean invites a poetic reflection on today’s existential themes in relation to nature. The images evoked by the bodies transport us to an another place: it is there that absurdity and poetry intersect, questions float and subtexts (there) reflect.

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With Pallae: Womanhood Story by Korean director Park So-Hyun, an activity as simple as laundry becomes a performative and narrative action set in a remote structure where bodies emerge in all their strength. The film takes its inspiration from Nam Jeongho’s contemporary dance performance Pallae, first presented in 1993. 

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During the opening day, Video Sound Art hosted a taiko performance by the Kotoji ensemble. The protagonists of the musical intervention are the traditional Japanese drums that, throughout history, have conveyed multiple meanings. From being an instrument of communication, to serving as an incitement in battle, their use during ceremonies of various kinds – religious, earth fertility rites, social festivals – makes them objects of strong symbolic power.
Founded in 2007 by Takeshi Demise, a student of Koji Nakamura, the Kotoji ensemble is made up of almost 20 percussionists united by their passion for the Japanese drum and the search for an authentic sound, as the group’s name suggests, ‘the way of the taiko sound’.

How can you float without sinking? is a site-specific performance, a score for three female bodies, which established a dialogue with the video work Con te by Letizia Cariello (LETIA).

The object of my practice is to create emotional landscapes that influence the bodies and voices of the dancers, leading them to act in metaphorical realities that condition their quality of movement. In this case, I worked on the immersion of the bodies in dialogue with Letizia Cariello (LETIA)‘s installation work, inviting the dancers to establish a connection with specific sections of the unfolding landscape, a process that starts from the emotional experience to connect perception and individual weaving. I have considered the space as a place of immersion that alters references, reconstructing an imaginary ocean in which the femininity of the bodies crosses it, with the help of sound scores and vocalisations that provoke a dimension of epidermal listening between the performers, between them and the elsewhere in which they find themselves, and between the audience and the elsewhere into which it is called to enter.
Silvia Giordano

Starting from the observation of a familiar tool such as the drill, the Drilling down lecture-performance focuses on its application outside the ordinary context.
The artist proposes a reinterpretation of the ancient surgical practice of drilling, which is still half-known and characterised by a perturbing underlying ambiguity.
Devoted to the conspiracy studies and conspiracy fantasies that have interested the debate in recent decades, the project connects a multitude of case studies: from the Neolithic age to 90’s electronic music, passing through the self-styled medieval practices of curing madness, up to today’s requests for drilling in online forums, cartoons, brainbloodvolume theory and much more.