Castello di Rivoli



ANRI SALA

AS YOU GO

edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcella Beccaria

Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino

26 February – 23 June 2019

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Fiorenzo Alfieri

1 President, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea

2 I am delighted to begin my presidency at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea with this project devoted to the artist Anri Sala.

Born in Tirana in 1974, Sala studied in Paris and resided in France for years before moving to Berlin, where he currently lives and works. During his career, he presented solo and group exhibitions at the world’s most important museums as well as representing France at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

Sala truly embodies the notion of the artist as global citizen in his ability to engage in a dialog with various cultures. His intentionally abstract art deals with the complexity of reality and the many narratives that any given moment may contain. Once again, the unique environment at Castello di Rivoli has inspired the work of a great artist. Sala’s project for this exhibition triggers unparalleled experiences, both visual and perceptual, which continue the Museum’s long engagement with the languages of the contemporary, underway since its very foundation.

Castello di Rivoli extends a special thanks to the artist and to all those who have supported the exhibition.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Director, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea

One of the most important international contemporary artists, Anri Sala has already participated in major exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, including the group shows Faces in the Crowd in 2005 and Colori. Emotions of Color in Art in 2017.

The Anri Sala. AS YOU GO exhibition is the world premiere of three extraordinary filmic works installed in relation to one another, based on a new choreographic concept that develops the idea of the present moment on which Sala’s work pivots, relating it to the architecture of the exhibition space and the physicality of the visitor experiencing the work.

Sala has prepared this exhibition using Virtual Reality, simulating the spaces of the third floor of the Castello and transforming his filmic pieces into a unique and innovative “sculpture in motion,” a “parade” that offers the public an immersive experience with a powerful emotional and synesthetic impact.

In line with his emancipatory vision of artistic language and visual culture, the artist has chosen the title AS YOU GO to stress the idea of a constant stream of images that leave the visitor to choose whether to move through the space in relation to the projections or to experience them while stationary.

Richly illustrated with images from the exhibition, this catalog is a scholarly tool for critical analysis of the artist’s oeuvre. It also contains Sala’s remarkable writings, published here for the first time.

In conclusion, I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to Anri Sala, his Studio team, our chief curator Marcella Beccaria, and all those who have worked on the exhibition and this volume.

...UNTIL WE BELONG TOGETHER

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

“Through this parade, the exhibition as a whole becomes a musical instrument that relies on the visitors’ bearings to gain its full dimension ... until they belong together.”

Anri Sala

What lies at the core of Anri Sala’s practice? Is it his interest in sculpting his audiences’ experience of space through video and sound? His fascination with the balance between programmed and improvised actions in the work of committed musicians? His interest in the emotions produced by intervals and gaps, where forms of reparation from historical trauma may occur? One of the most intellectual artists in the field today, Anri Sala creates films and installations, as well as sculptural objects and drawings, that speak elegiacally both of the highest forms of Western culture, often the work of great musical composers and performers, and of the catastrophes of the human and non-human body — its limbs amputated, its hands severed[1].

Yet his works empathetically project an acute awareness of pain in ways that are never dramatically outspoken. Almost all his works refer directly or indirectly to forms of resistance to this amputation through craft—the making of things with expertise, precision, and dedication[2].

Anri Sala’s art investigates traumatic turning points or their aftermath in modern West European history and is deeply rooted in his situated experience as a diasporic Albanian born in Tirana, in 1974, who moved to France at the age of twentytwo in 1996 and has lived and worked in Berlin since 2004.

Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth century until it first became independent

in 1912 following the rise of late nineteenth-century movements of national independence in much of Europe. Albania was never part of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–1941) formed in the Balkans at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, yet it lies at the heart of what used to be called the Balkan peninsula — the European lands of the Ottoman Empire to the west of the Bosphorus Straits— the heart of advanced literature and culture for the Ottomans. Occupied by Italy just prior to World War II, after the war it became a communist state, the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania, until that collapsed in 1990, with the disintegration of the bloc of states that had been governed under the aegis of the Soviet Union. Anri Sala was fifteen when the Berlin wall came down in 1989. A binary Cold War world that had divided Europe began to shatter and along with it, all the norms and rules of Eastern European life. From 1945 until 1992, Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of six republics comprising Serbia (including Kosovo with a majority of ethnic Albanians), Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. During the ethnic wars in the 1990s opposing Serbia to these new independent former Yugoslavian states, Albania was nearby, close to the horror — fearfully close, yet not involved in the wars. Today, Albania borders on the Mediterranean Adriatic Sea to the West, Montenegro to the North (itself bordering with Bosnia and Herzegovina, capital Sarajevo), on Kosovo to the Northeast, Macedonia to the East, and Greece to the South. When socialist Albania collapsed in 1990, Anri Sala did not emigrate immediately, but rather attended the National Academy of Arts in Tirana from 1992 to 1996. While the previous socialist regime had enforced Social Realism and academic painting, the new liberal course allowed for young artists to express themselves through abstraction and encouraged the development of a personal style and touch — something that the young artist found just as canonical and forced as the previous aesthetic norms. Rather than indulge in such forms of extreme individualistic self-expression, he began to study the ancient art of fresco painting, a highly enduring technique of wall painting where pigment is not mixed with any binding but absorbed into the fresh, wet plaster of the surface of a wall and fi xed inside the wall itself as it dries. To work in fresco means to be extremely aware of time, since one must divide one’s work into giornate or “days,” preparing the fresh plaster area to be painted in one day only. If the plaster dries, the pigment will not be absorbed and the fi nal effect will be lost. The connection between one giornata and another is an essential part of the fresco artist’s process: never working with a straight line, which would make too visible a division, the artist places the fresh plaster in the sinuous shape that corresponds to the contours of the different forms to be painted. There is something time-based, sequential, architectural, structural, and musical in this form of wall painting, and its skills seem to have seeped deeply into the video-installations that Anri Sala would later create.

From late 1996 to 1998, he lived in France to study video at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, after which he attended the Postgraduate Studies in fi lm directing at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing. In 1997, he went home for a short time and there he created his fi rst memorable artwork, Intervista (Finding the Words). Completed a year later, it was a documentary narrative based on a piece of silent footage of his mother at a political rally in 1977 and interviewed on TV in 1979 at the age of thirty-three in communist Albania. He recorded her in the present, watching her younger self, unable to remember her own words. That year, 1997, was a year of strong social unrest in Albania caused by the collapse of a number of financial pyramid schemes, and the country was effectively in a civil war; after the death of 2,000 people, the government was toppled.

The work deals with the traumatic legacy of communist Albania. Anri Sala finds an old reel of film footage of his mother, Valdet Sala, as a young and committed communist woman standing next to the dictator Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Party of Labor of Albania (PPSh) from 1941 to 1985, as they attend a Labor Youth Union Congress in 1977. On the same reel, she is later seen being interviewed in 1979 by Albanian National Television. The found footage is mute, since at the time sound was recorded separately from image. Anri Sala’s artwork narrates his contemporary attempt to reconstruct his mother’s words with the help of children from a school for the deaf, as well as through a conversation with his mother as they watch the silent film together. In Intervista, he asks his mother, “How do you feel about only deaf-mutes reading into your past?” She replies, “It’s an irony of fate […] We were living in a deaf and dumb system where we only spoke with one mouth and one voice […] We thought we’d change the world, and little by little we lost everything. Our generation was the victim of past errors.” She continues, “I think we’ve passed on to you the ability to doubt. Because you must always question the truth.”

Anri Sala’s complex installations encourage his audiences to be alert and pay attention, to decode the structure of the artwork, to exercise and fine tune their interpretative abilities, to emancipate themselves from the passivity produced by our pro-science and pro-technology era of algorithms that progressively remove the interpretative capabilities of the human, and thus our decisional agency. In the filmic installation called AS YOU GO (2019), created specially for the spaces of the eighteenth-century Castello di Rivoli, for example, the artist folded three earlier artworks, the films Ravel Ravel (2013), Take Over (2017) and If and Only If (2018) into a new combined artwork. Like a large musical instrument, the display itself constituted not just a frame in which the work was viewed, but a meta-artwork, a moving sculpture, a perceptual device that became the actual subject of the work. Like components of an unusual orchestra, the three works are projected in the galleries, scrolling through the spaces of the museum. And playing music is what goes on in all three films, which respectively take their cues from: Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major (1929–30); two songs—La Marseillaise (1792) and The Internationale (1888); and Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola (1944).

Anri Sala, however, is interested in music not for its content but for its structure: how it sets up the encounter between the artwork and the audience in time; how it transforms an architecture of space into an architecture of time; and how it unfolds and articulates that encounter with the audience. To manifest this interest, he exaggerated the existing architecture of the Castello which is divided into five “gray cube” rooms just over 4 meters high and not covered by a ceiling. Like a giant architectural rendering that you could look at from above, the entire space lay below the overarching ceiling of dark wooden beams. Two 12 x 12 meter rooms are followed by a double-sized 12 x 24 meter hall and finally by other two 12 x 12 meter galleries. A central longitudinal main wall divides this rational eighteenthcentury architectural space into two main parts. Anri Sala extended this dividing structural wall so that it penetrated into the large double-sized hall, making this long wall central to the entire architecture. For the artist, it became a doublesided projection screen, passing through all the galleries. The central galleries on each side of the long main wall also had freestanding screens in them, further complicating the experience of viewers, who could choose which way to go. They could enter the space at one end and walk through all the galleries around the long wall, then exit and reenter in a looped itinerary. They could also walk behind or in front of the secondary separate screens, between them and the wall, in the interval: “I am interested in the idea that there is no destination to reach, that the finality is in the trajectory.”[3]

He also created a synchronized system of multiple projectors so that the three works could be projected consecutively, one after another, in a peculiar way: with important intervals of blank wall in between sections of film, each appeared to literally go on a journey, moving from left to right around the entire space. Wherever you were, you would see the exact same frame of film and the sound in the entire space was in unison. There were two movements: the moving image in each film and the film itself as an object moving in the physical space in front of the viewers. As a viewer, you could choose to stand still and the film would pass by and exit to your right, but shortly thereafter reappear from your left, or you could walk with the moving film so that you would see its evolution in synch with your own body. Anri Sala stated: «The exhibition takes the form of a “parade,” where video works and their developing narratives travel across the entire space. Visitors can stroll with the flow, accompanying its nomadic substance across the consecutive rooms, gaining ground, or experience the itinerant works from a laid-back position, standing or sitting, as the works pass them by […]. Even if the sequence unfolds in the continuous present and simultaneously in all the rooms (ubiquitously), the notion of the future tense is omnipresent. From here comes this feeling that upsets us: one sees a film entering the room from the left just after one sees it leave the room to the right. The fact that the future (in a temporal sense) emerges from the space where we have just passed through produces a disturbance.[4]

To produce this disturbance, the tempo of the intervals and the program for this work, the artist recreated the museum using Virtual Reality in his studio in Berlin, so that he could test the effects. At first sight, therefore, one might imagine that the work celebrates the potential of technology. Yet,

on the contrary, in our age of Artificial Intelligence and siliconization of the world,[5] of constant self-displacement, attention to “elsewhere” because of our smart phones and social media, and traumatic severing of interiority from the experience of an embodied world, an installation like AS YOU GO relies on the most sophisticated technology of Virtual Reality and the mapping software Pandora to create an artwork of utterly analog reality. It celebrates the precise opposite of Virtual Reality, since Anri Sala uses technologies as tools with goals opposite to those for which they were created. “I am refining the parade as much as I can here in the studio,” he wrote from Berlin, adding, “I cannot wait to join you in Rivoli for a little bit of reality, because I am spending too much time in simulations and the virtual.”[6]

To be embodied in a place means to be in the present moment. Anri Sala’s viewers are already in the present moment through watching films of musical performances recorded in the present moment. In AS YOU GO, there are no narratives, nor cuts to the past or future. Experiencing the movement of

the films around a carousel like a conveyor belt or a parade, the viewers become aware of being in the here and now. This attention to the present moment is a reprise of the phenomenological interests of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.[7] In this sense, Anri Sala claims the space of the exhibition — which in the past was considered a place of removal from reality — as a space of reality, of authenticity: a truly public space. What does this mean today? How does it relate or speak to the urgent questions of now? We live in an era of big data and reproduced images, with a flow of images produced and reproduced on the internet. Overwhelmed by data, we increasingly navigate them through programs of AI that interpret and do the thinking for us, and our only function is to “click.” The wish to rebuild situations of active interpretation is a counter-reaction to this disempowerment by algorithms. In this perspective, Anri Sala’s work is a form of political and aesthetic resistance to the passivity encouraged by the digital.

Interested in intervals in the rhythm of music, images, and experiences, he reverses in this exhibition the emerging paradigm of passivity of the visitors who receive the illusion of reality by standing still, inviting them instead to move with the images in a corporeal way, chasing them along the exhibition path. More than a presentation of three interwoven film works, it is a projection device that becomes a unique and gigantic sculpture in movement. As in earlier films that stage the aspirations and failures of modernity, there is a tone to much of Anri Sala’s work in AS YOU GO that refers to traumatized subjects and their ability to react.

With Ravel Ravel, the artist stages the simultaneous vision of two interpretations by two different pianists of the Concerto for the Left Hand. Composed by Ravel between 1929 and 1930, the concerto was commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during World War I. In the words of Anri Sala, “Ravel Ravel was born from the intention to present two performances with their respective tempos. Sometimes they play in unison and then chase each other in temporal shifts, producing echoes and repetitions that seem to transform the physicality of the exhibition space.”

In Take Over, he investigates the possible meanings arising from the juxtaposition of La Marseillaise and The Internationale, whose complex stories are intertwined. Composed in 1792 by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, La Marseillaise became the hallmark of the French Revolution to then spread to other countries and become a symbol of political freedom. At the end of the nineteenth century, The Internationale was the anthem of workers’ struggles, welcomed to promote ideals of equality and solidarity. Written in 1871, the text of The Internationale was initially sung to the tune of La Marseillaise. In 1888, Pierre Degeyter wrote the music with which it became the anthem of the international socialist movement. Taking inspiration from the plots that link these two famous musical pieces, as well as the distances and differences, Anri Sala’s work juxtaposes two consecutive performances: in one the pianist plays La Marseillaise on a mechanical piano that is programmed to play The Internationale, while in the second, the situation is reversed and the pianist plays The Internationale on a mechanical piano programmed to play La Marseillaise. Here, the competition between human and machine becomes explicit, reminding us of the difficulty of defying or contradicting automatic language correctors and many other algorithms of daily life. At times, the two anthems are in accord; at other times there is dissonance and they clash, just as, when considering the symbolic meanings of the songs themselves, we move back and forth, unable to resolve contradictory connotations: is The Internationale a song celebrating freedom, or does it instead represent oppression, as it would for a young person from Eastern Europe? Is La Marseillaise a revolutionary song, or a song belonging to colonizers, as it may be experienced, for example, in the Maghreb?

The music of the five-minute Elegy for Solo Viola (1944) by Igor Stravinsky in If and Only If seems distorted, slightly out of synch with the Lento tempo of the score. Here, it is longer than it is supposed to be, by just over nine minutes. The original elegy was commissioned from Stravinsky by the Belgian Germain Prévost in the middle of World War II as a homage to the violinist Alphonse Onnou, who had died in the US just after Hitler had invaded Belgium in 1940. The lengthening of the composition in Anri Sala’s work occurs because the viola player Gérard Caussé slows down or accelerates his playing in order to accommodate and protect a snail that moves slowly upwards along the wooden part of his bow to reach its tip, away from what is certainly a danger for it — the place of contact between string and instrument. There is a moment when a second snail suddenly appears on Caussé’s bow from the bottom left of the screen, so that you glimpse two snails at the same time on screen, at different positions on the bow. This double appears like a glitch, putting into question the binary and simplistic interpretation of what we are seeing, suggesting there is a space outside the frame where decisions have been made by an author, and the film is a montage of different shots. This moment of awareness of the factual, fabricated and constructed nature of the recorded image is a moment of awareness of our own ability to be attentive, to be precise, to be singular, to be alive — of homo faber within animal laborans. Because of the looped nature of AS YOU GO, this poetic homage to the need to coordinate between human and nonhuman agencies, Caussé and the snail(s), ultimately become a filmic construction where the film could dilate and play infinitely along a strip of wall, the snail forever moving up the bow, and forever starting over. We progress and yet are always at the start, in an existential condition where time is at once linear, circular, multiple, and overlapping.

Indeed, as the axis of the entire building was elongated, the main projection wall became a gigantic bow itself, and we, the viewers, either walked, like the snail, along it up to its tip and around the edge of the wall that ended halfway through the large double-sized gallery, turned around and walked down the other opposite side, following the movement of the scrolling films, or we chose to stay put and watch the film go by us. We are in a space of temporal plasticity, where the violist extends the duration and metamorphosizes the interpretation of a score in order to accommodate and cohabit with a snail (perhaps two, or potentially infinite snails) living on his bow, bending the music to accommodate his movements to those of the snail… until they belong together, as Anri Sala put it. This continuous evolution and plasticity of film in space as a consequence of difficult conditions, such as finding oneself on a human viola player’s bow, recalls Catherine Malabou’s concepts. In Ontology of the Accident. An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2009), she addresses the

transformation and change that can occur in the aftermath of trauma, as the consequence of a form of improvisation able to address the need of a subject to regain life: «In the usual order of things, lives run their course like rivers. The changes and metamorphoses of a life due to vagaries and difficulties, or simply the natural unfolding of circumstance, appear as the marks and wrinkles of a continuous, almost logical, process of fulfillment that leads ultimately to death. In time, one eventually becomes who one is; one becomes only who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but reinforce the permanence of identity, caricaturing or fixing it, but never contradicting it. They never disrupt identity. This gradual existential and biological incline, which can only ever transform the subject into itself, does not, however, obviate the powers of plasticity of this same identity that houses itself beneath an apparently smooth surface like a reserve of dynamite hidden under the peachy skin of being for death. As a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all, the path splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person, and eventually takes up all the room. An unrecognizable persona whose present comes from no past, whose future harbors nothing to come, an absolute existential improvisation. A form born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident. A new being comes into the world for a second time, out of a deep cut that opens in a biography».[8]

This augural subjectivity usually emerges from damage, and involves becoming a stranger to one’s former self, but such transformation may also be apparently inexplicable, not emerging from any evident trauma. Malabou calls this transformative agency “destructive plasticity” and suggests that the forgetting of the former self is a displacement of pain: “What destructive plasticity invites us to consider is the suffering caused by an absence of suffering, in the emergence of a new form of being, a stranger to the one before. Pain that manifests as indifference to pain, impassivity, forgetting, the loss of symbolic reference points.”[9] This is the “survivor’s identity, a never before seen existential and vital configuration. A brain damaged identity which, even as an absence from the self, is nonetheless well and truly a psyche. […] Plasticity thus refers to the possibility of being transformed without being destroyed; it characterizes the entire strategy of modification that seeks to avoid the threat of destruction.”[10] Malabou’s approach contrasts with the philosopher and psychologist Henri Bergson’s late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century theories of “creative evolution,” in which time and the experience of consciousness are in a constant state of flow with no ruptures, even though there are accelerations and contractures. At the same time, Malabou builds on his sense of time as subjective duration. Indeed, she acknowledges that there is slow progressive change and there are also sudden instantaneous transformations, and

for the traumatized subject, both occur at once.

The space/time that Anri Sala addresses in his works is often that where both such forms of transformation occur and interact, in the interval between the before and the after, the former self and the new subjectivity. An interval is a space or gap between objects, units, points, or states. It is more generally associated with the field of music, theater, and cinema as a period of time or duration, usually brief, between two parts, acts or sections of a performance, during which the audience regains consciousness of being in an embodied reality, after and before being transported through the imagination into the parallel world of the performance. It can be a simple blank interruption, intermission and interstice, or it can contain an interlude, a form of content in its own

right, like a bridge between two parts of a song.[11]

The existence of an interval therefore implies a form of discontinuity, a before and an after. Yet at the same time, the interval implies its own antonym — which is continuity — because it connects two previously distinct parts. Generally, this juncture is imagined as having no space at all, as just a line or division between a here and a there, a before and an after. Yet this line is thick, and it is more an interval than a point of contact; it is the space between the giornate in a fresco, it is a zone of overlap where the past pushes into the future as memory, and memory constitutes the substance of presence. This is the space of plasticity, of metamorphosis, the space where a pianist learns the virtuosic ability to play, with only one hand, an entire concerto that sounds as if it were played by two, as in Ravel Ravel, or where a subject learns to confront and remember her former, forgotten self with the help of her son, the artist Anri Sala, and of a school for handicapped children able to read her lips, as in Intervista, or the interval that is night, the solitary time when Jacques can be at peace in Nocturnes (1999), or the interval between sleep and wake, learning to rest even in a seated position as does the old homeless man in Uomoduomo (2000), or the space/time of waiting for a bomb to fall during the instant between the sound of its falling and the crash, as in Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2) (2002), or the interval during which a community paints a city in bright colors in Dammi i Colori (2003), or the plastic urban space of walking from home to a rehearsal in a vulnerable Sarajevo during the days of the siege in 1992–96, when snipers terrorized the population by shooting at innocent by-passers from the hills above, in 1395 Days without Red (2011).

In discussing time and temporality, Giorgio Agamben distinguishes chronological time (time characterized by homogeneous linearity, with a succession of moments with no qualitative distinction between one moment and another) from kairological time, which is a special time, detached from linear chronology, where the moment is distinct, an event hic et nunc, perceived as outside normal time. Messianic time (the time after Christ’s death, as told in the New Testament) is a form of time where every moment of messianic time repeats and completes an event that occurred before the birth of Christ (as told in the Old Testament), in a sequence of moments of Kairos.[12] What Agamben does not address, however, is time as duration, nor the time between events, the left-over or residue of the great moments of historical or messianic events, as it is experienced in consciousness. These are the intervals of history, the intervals of daily life, entwined with the experience of waiting, itself often a space where emotions such as fear are perceived, or a mixture between boredom and fear and expectation occurs. The experience of time speeding up and slowing down, curving, folding, overlapping, twisting—its distortion, in other words—is very much the experience of Anri Sala’s universe, a more complex world of temporality than that of the daily common sense, but surely one more structurally subtle, a deeper one. It is an extra time, extra space, pushing into the space and time in which we live, the chronological time, and the kairological time of the instant. It is the elastic, extended durée that pushes itself into the real. Improvisation is the technique of plasticity in the interval and it relies on moments of repose, which interrupt the flow of duration, creating a “spatialized temporality” and “rhythm time.”[13]

In Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2), a young man from Belgrade named Mihajlo simulates over and over again, like a foley artist, his memories of hearing at night the whistling sound of a missile falling, including the moment of silence — the gap or interval — just before it hits its target. Anri Sala writes, “what moved me most about Mihajlo […] was the unyielding detachment he felt towards what hit him: that strange event known as the ‘surgical strike.’ Though it did not place his life in danger, at night it stopped him living it, creating a sense of ennui.”[14] The gap or interval as a subject comes up again when the artist writes about the work time after time (2003), in which for a little over five minutes, he films a horse on a highway at night in Tirana, standing still near a cement barrier, unable to escape from the terrifying trucks and cars speeding by. The horse lifts its hoof over and over again, the nervous repetition of a suffering animal. Does the title refer to the repetition of the passing cars, or to the time after time that Agamben described? Anri Sala writes, “Is it possible to produce a visible manifestation of loss? What is the appearance of what is not entirely there? There must be a singular way of inscribing beings or things in the present so that they embody simultaneously what they used to be and no longer are, consequently representing their disappearance in progress.”[15]

Anri Sala is able to sculpt intervals so that they connect rather than disconnect. He focuses on the emotional tones produced by distortions of perspective, translations, interpretations, and transformations in order to heighten consciousness, believing in the emancipatory potential of high art and culture. For him, the making of art, and the experiencing of it, aims to create awareness and understanding of how manipulation works. Art exercises consciousness by exploring the delay that interrupts the automatism of the uninterrupted flow of information, without intervals and gaps.

In AS YOU GO, no matter where you find yourself in real space along the looped wall/conveyor belt, the image of the film you are watching is contemporaneously everywhere at exactly the same point in the film, as if we were in front of a classical cinema screen. It is a Klein bottle situation therefore, like a 3D Möbius strip, where we the viewers (we, the people) are not standing passively at a central point wearing VR goggles, experiencing a virtual 360 degrees world, our bodies vestigial and atrophied except for our necks turning up and down in servile slavery. Rather, we are looking at the 360 degrees Bubble Vision[16] from the outside, choosing at every moment whether to walk along with the flowing moving image and see the internal movement of its frames, or whether to stand still and watch the film move by us, awaiting the next scene to reach us from the left.

According to Hito Steyerl, new immersive technologies isolate viewers from the world: «The viewer is at the center of the sphere, yet at the same time, [is] actually missing. They are fully immersed in something they are not part of […] This kind of vision is shaped by round things, by orbs, by spheres, by rounded lenses. One could call this paradigm “Bubble Vision”. In the last decade, 360 panoramas became common in photography, in video and in VR. In parallel, there were a lot of discussions of “filter bubbles” that are said to create division by creating parallel information universes even though those statements have been contested».[17]

Anri Sala celebrates the highest possible degree of sophisticated culture, the most precise reverberation of a chord, touched by the keenest pianist, in the face of ineptness, superficiality, stupidity. The more he tweaks his works in space, seeking a certain perfection, the better they become, dense with the efforts of reaching a rhythm that is emotionally potent for himself and, by extension, for others. But there is something Sisyphean in this attempt. “Perfect” seems like an arbitrary word. Perfect according to what and to whom? And is this not an elitist concept to be put away for good in the name of democratic aesthetics?

Perficere, in Latin, is to “complete” something. It is not dissimilar to the notion of precision, from prae (before) and caedere (to cut), although one term implies a gained sense of wholeness (as opposed to separateness, to being in parts), while the other suggests a defined edge, the edge where something has been cut off precisely, thus heightening the edge of what is felt to be complete. The quality of the work is defined by its precision and its perfection.

And yet, Anri Sala stays with the trouble — provoking the definiteness of the edge dividing the surface from the nonsurface, or provoking the boundary between the non-perfect, the non-whole, and the perfect, the complete, the whole. He digs deep into the intervals one did not notice, the spaces on the edge that become distorted or pulled or extended to make space for a miracle, a little bit of extra time, a little bit of extra space, a hesitation. And in these gaps, in these intervals (the time between the sound of the bomb falling and the explosion when it hits the ground) he finds a space of refuge, a space of suspended time and history, of suspended conflict, of peace, a little “extra” conquered at great pain, that is a space of freedom for the individual, an extra-libidinal energy, purposeless, not quantifiable in an economy of time. Our bodies are separated by distances and by shards of overdetermined identities that divide and fragment us, like zombies or ghosts, or survivors perhaps, in a splintered world in which we speak to each other in short summary messages that shoot across the globe in apparent simultaneity. Something intrinsic to all of Anri Sala’s work, however, helps to suture the parts, to connect them like the different giornate of a fresco, and this is “the attempt to create a continuity between moments that are separated or have been torn apart, giving presence to what has become absent.”[18]

Anri Sala celebrates the highest forms of human culture as the expression of committed minds, practiced craftspeople, and able musicians — animalia laborantes that redeem a confused homo faber, in order to contrast the self-perception of the human turned into an imperfect, fragile organism by the technophile ideology of Artificial Intelligence. Thus he does not create an artwork embodied like a VR program. He rather reins in and bends VR to become a mere tool, useful to his craft of improvising a moving space/sound/film machine. Once the work was accomplished, he let go of the VR, like in a digital detox clinic, and celebrated instead our wanderings through the barely lit galleries of the museum, a space of a new Situationist dérive, a space of bodily freedom in which

to stroll, to sit, to stay, to go, free to repose, and to pose the question: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” The ultimate question is one of a radical freedom of choice, unwired, unplugged, virtuosically human, and in tender miscegenation with our living allies. Like the snails.

BEFORE SOUND BECOMES MUSIC

Marcella Beccaria

I shall now perform a small experiment. I push the glass of water beside my computer to the edge of the desk. I then push it a bit further, until part of the bottom sticks out over the edge, and go on pushing, millimeter by millimeter. I hold my breath as my finger touches the surface of the glass. What I want to see, or rather perceive, is the moment that separates the presence of the glass on my desk from its fall to the ground. I am not performing this experiment in order to explain the law of gravity to my daughter or to make room in my working space — even though this is sorely needed. I am doing it for myself, in order to explain to myself, albeit with a certain degree of approximation,

the most indefinable and at the same time pervasive aspect of Anri Sala’s art, namely his deep interest in what he calls the “present moment.” Almost as though opening up the hic et nunc of the ancient Latin world to the complexity of quantum mechanics, Sala’s present moment is a constantly expanding investigation that enables him to capture in his works the ineffable meaningfulness of the instant in which reality is on the point of materializing, thus revealing a dense interweaving of possibilities. To draw a comparison with the analogical world, it is as though his present moment were capable of isolating the inexpressible instant in which the hour hand is about to move. Nor is this all. Instead of presenting themselves as possible documents that record a specific present moment related in every case to a particular situation, the artist’s works also act as devices capable of triggering that instant, thus themselves becoming joint producers of the enigmatic fragment of time and space that separates before and after. The ways in which this spark is struck, giving rise to gripping experiential situations, is the subject addressed here, in connection with the exhibition AS YOU GO and the work Bridges in the Doldrums displayed there.

Devised by the artist for the galleries on the third floor of the Castello di Rivoli, AS YOU GO presents the films Ravel Ravel (2013), Take Over (2017), and If and Only If (2018) in a new dynamic sequence. The exhibition begins to subtly manifest itself to the visitor as a series of sounds pervading the interstitial spaces, including the stairs and the entrance on the third floor. The sounds are enigmatic, evidently percussive but with an unusual rhythm that defies deciphering. As we draw

closer, the mystery is solved—but only in part. The origin of the sounds is revealed as four snare drums, each with a seductive chrome skin, positioned on the floor and ceiling. Each drum is being struck by a pair of drumsticks, apparently wielded by invisible hands, since no mechanism is detected by the eye. Closer investigation reveals that their movement is responding to the vibrations of the reflecting surface of each drum, inside which the artist has placed two speakers, one low-frequency and the other mid-range. The low-frequency speaker generates the vibrations that trigger the skin, which in response makes the drumsticks move, thus reversing the habitual relationship whereby the percussive action is performed by the drumsticks. The initially slow rhythm gradually becomes quicker in a gripping crescendo. Thanks to the audible sounds emitted by the mid-range speakers, as opposed to the inaudible sounds emitted by the low-frequency ones, it sometimes seems possible to recognize something, perhaps a familiar tune, but only for a few beats before another rhythm takes over.

Anri Sala describes the work in question, Bridges in the Doldrums (2016), as follows: “a three-part arrangement for saxophone, trombone, and clarinet […] constructed solely from the bridges of 74 pop, jazz and folk songs from different periods and geographies.”[19] The work was developed by Sala from an initial version in the form of a performance held at the Havana Biennial in 2015. Produced in collaboration with the musician André Vida, this initially included 100 songs in an arrangement for saxophone, trombone, and flute, which was subsequentely reworked and edited down to 74 songs, as an arrangement for saxophone, trombone, and clarinet. This updated version of the performance was recorded in a studio in Berlin to become the soundtrack of the sculptural piece Bridges in the Doldrums. Prior to the Castello di Rivoli, the work was presented at Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, where it was installed with two additional speakers in an adjacent room that played the full audible soundtrack. In all the versions described, the instruments selected often play parts originally written for others, thus responding to one another and altering their role. The fulcrum of the work is always the “bridge,” the short passage in a piece of popular music, usually of four or eight beats, leading up to the melody of the refrain. If the refrain can be described as the apotheosis of the song, the moment in which the latter actually manifests itself, often in such an immediately recognizable form as to become haunting, especially in pop music, the bridge is instead a passage of tension, almost of indecision, in which the instruments can halt the tempo by falling silent together for a brief instant. As a result, the listeners are separated momentarily from what they know before being plunged into the refrain, almost like reaching a safe harbor after being lost on unknown seas. As the artist explains, “the bridge alienates the listener from the song itself, keeping one’s attention while suspending one’s belief and expectations, until the chorus returns to reconfirm their acquaintance with it.”

In Bridges in the Doldrums the progression toward ever-faster rhythms further enhances the intrinsic value of the concept of the bridge. By extending the tension of awaiting some recognizable tune, the work constantly renews a sense of expectation and desire. Instead of granting listeners the satisfaction of a known melody, it unceasingly teases their desire for safety, building up palpable tension on every encounter. Paradoxically enough, in this process, during which many instants renew the unrecognizability of those preceding them, visitors are confronted with what they presumably know best, that is, their own faces and expressions. The chrome finish of each drum functions as a gleaming mirror that captures whatever appears before it, thus visually confirming that the work is a part of reality in a given place and a precise moment.

As always in Sala’s art, the title of the work adds a further level of interpretation (the artist insists on keeping all of his titles in the language in which he originally conceived them and avoiding any attempt at translation). The play on words here is evident between the drums, which give the work its sculptural shape, and the “doldrums” (probably derived from a combination of “dull” and “tantrum”), a nautical term that entered English in the nineteenth century. In addition to a condition or state of mind, it also indicates the area now known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Extending a few miles north and south of the Equator in accordance with unpredictable seasonal fluctuations, this belt encircling the globe and its oceans is characterized by low atmospheric pressure that reduces the speed of winds, which become extremely variable or completely absent. Dead calm can alternate with sudden storms, trapping sail-driven vessels for days or weeks on end. Sadly familiar to the sailors who first crossed the oceans and still feared by present-day transoceanic crews, the doldrums correspond to stretches of sea in which sailors know that they have no control over their fate and exist in a state of constant uncertainty.

Further investigation into the semantic possibilities reverberating in the title reveal that the term “bridge” also establishes an unprecedented relationship with the site of Castello di Rivoli. Sala chose to display the work in the room on the third floor of the museum, an unusual kind of loft, which is now equipped with a bridge-like walkway after renovation by the architect Andrea Bruno. During the restoration, commenced in 1979 with the idea of enabling visitors to appreciate the stunning technical complexity of the building’s architecture (as developed by Carlo Randoni from 1793 after the initial work by Filippo Juvarra), Bruno decided to dispense with a conventional floor and design a metal walkway running diagonally across the room, widening out in the middle. This allows viewers to see the extrados of the masonry ceiling of the vast and imposing room below on the second floor. Bruno’s restoration project also preserved the reinforced-concrete roof trusses of the loft as part of the building’s history. Built by the Italian civil engineering corps in 1948, these structures replaced the original wooden beams destroyed in 1943, when Castello di Rivoli was struck by an incendiary bomb during the dramatic air raids of World War II. Sala embraces this extraordinary combination of history and memories by placing one drum on the eighteenth-century extrados and hanging the others on the twentieth-century trusses. The middle of the walkway thus becomes a place rife with meaning, introducing visitors to the sequence of films that comprise AS YOU GO and offering them their first experience of the artist’s focus on the poetic value of the “present moment.”

As often in the artist’s work, where various strands of investigation run parallel and one work can give birth to another, Bridges in the Doldrums is located within a sequential, organic evolution that includes snare drums as sound-emitting sculptures. First appearing in Sala’s art in the spring of 2009 with A Solo in the Doldrums, this “family” can be traced back in turn to themes regarding the ways in which a given place influences the unfolding of the events that occur in it, as initially explored in the video work Answer Me (2008). Shot in Teufelsberg near Berlin, Answer Me is set in a former secret base, previously used by the CIA and NSA to eavesdrop on Soviet communications during the Cold War. The iconic geodesic dome becomes the scene of a peculiar “quasi-dialogue” between a man and a woman based on a short text by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. While the woman attempts to establish verbal dialogue and obtain answers as she seeks to end their affair, the man concentrates all his attention on drumming. Sitting with his back to her, he uses the drum kit to produce a dense series of sounds that drown her words and cause her to fall silent, thus transforming the void of his silence into a solid wall of noise. Though unwilling to enter into conversation, the man establishes a sort of communication that consists of replacing the language of words with musical frequencies. The acoustic characteristics of the dome create a distinctly long echo (Sala’s male lead is a professional percussionist who devised the rhythmic sequence in precise relation to the frequency response of the space in which the film is set). In one scene, the camera captures the woman’s anguish and her awareness that she is receiving answers even though in non-verbal form. More explicit than so many words, the man’s rhythmic drumming makes her deeply distraught. As she holds her bent head between her hands, the snare drum beside her reacts in turn to the power of the long echo sweeping through the dome. Even though no one is actually wielding the drumsticks, they respond to the vibrations imparted to its surface.

As the artist observes, music has gradually taken on a predominant function in his work as a form of expression that, unlike language, amplifies perception of the present: “It is believed that the longest present moments — those pieces of time in which memory is not yet activated and notions of past and future do not arise—occur while listening to music.” It is after Answer Me that snare drums, to which the artist refers generically as “doldrums,” become autonomous works as a logical consequence of their genesis. But unlike in the film, where the frequencies in the dome generate the vibration of the drum and the response of the sticks, in Sala’s subsequent sound sculptures this relationship is reversed. By inserting a low-frequency speaker into the drum, the artist engineers the

work so that it is the instrument itself, from the inside, that causes the drumsticks to move. What remains predominant is the role of the “doldrum” as an agent capable of capturing in sonic form — and in accordance with a predilection for the abstract that runs through the artist’s work as a whole— certain characteristics of a given place. It is indeed through the “doldrums” that Sala is able to embrace stories, memories, tensions, and fears, but also physical characteristics such as architecture or even geographic situations and meteorological conditions, and “translate” them into frequencies. These frequencies, which may or may not be audible, gradually open up each work to new interactions and potential meanings. It is this simultaneous presence, this extraordinary array of potentialities, that enables us as visitors to experience the “present moment” to the full, almost as though helping us to attain a state of deep meditation.

Sala explored the great potential inherent in snare drums as elements that reiterate the truth of the present in his first major show in an American museum, namely Purchase Not By Moonlight at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in the winter of 2008. Five snare drums were positioned in relation to the columned building’s architectural structure and to the selection of films presented, including Answer Me. Interpreting the setting of his films as a veritable choreography with a corresponding rhythmic basis, the artist develops a low-frequency track for each and plays it in synchrony with the film through speakers inserted in snare drums. The movements of the sticks on each drum respond to and reiterate the rhythm of each of the films shown, thus creating a kind of soundtrack made up of pure percussion. While in Purchase Not By Moonlight Sala does not regard the “doldrums” as an autonomous work, the exhibition constitutes a significant precedent, a sort of “meta-work” within the trajectory that also includes AS YOU GO. It should indeed be emphasized that AS YOU GO was conceived by the artist as both an exhibition and a work. Understood as a new

piece conceived especially for Castello di Rivoli comprising a set of works, it can be defined in all respects as a “metaexhibition,” thus extending the premises identifiable in the first presentation in Miami. The first autonomous work in the “family” of doldrums is A Solo in the Doldrums (2009). It was born out of an invitation from the British choreographer Siobhan Davies to produce a joint work. Sala responded by asking Davies to devise a choreography to be staged in the absence of any audience. Having fitted Davies with a microphone to record the sounds of her breathing and movements while dancing, he then translated these into lowfrequency impulses, inaudible to the human ear, and played them on the drum’s inbuilt speaker so that the drumsticks responded to the vibrations. In this sense, the work adds an important element: the paradox of making the invisible visible, placing viewers in the condition of awaiting the movements and sounds of the drumsticks without being able to foretell when they will come.

With the works immediately following this, namely Another Solo in the Doldrums (2011), presented at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and Another Solo in the Doldrums (Extended Play) (2012), devised for his exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Sala developed the frequencies (again in inaudible form) on the basis of the soundtrack resulting from the set of video works presented in the two shows. While the works function in these specific contexts as responses to the sonic emissions that pervade the space, their having been extrapolated from their original setting turns them into memories of past shows, in accordance with a procedure further developed with Another Clash in the Doldrums (2014). Conceived by Sala in conjunction with the Vincent Award, where he presented the pieces Le Clash (2010) and Tlateloco Clash (2011) on two back-to-back screens, the work is a snare drum that responds to the translation in low frequencies of sounds present in the two works. The resulting track seems to represent a sort of competition between the two videos for control over the vibrations to be transmitted to the drumsticks.

Names in the Doldrums (2014) saw his first insertion of two speakers into the snare drum, one emitting inaudible low frequencies, as in the previous works, and the other mid-range frequencies, which can be heard by the human ear. The work was created within the framework of a solo show at

the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Sala’s first in Israel, and in relation to the dramatic events occurred shortly before, thus expanding the idea that the work responds to the place and to the echoes that inhabit it. A few weeks before the opening of the exhibition, which Sala significantly called No Names, No Title, violent clashes in the Gaza Strip led to the tragic deaths of numerous children. In his studio in Berlin, the artist heard the sad list of names read out on the radio. Banned by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority and no longer transmitted, the recording was used by the artist as part of his work, not only preserving the broadcast

of the human voice reading the list of names, but also reiterating its silencing enforced by local authorities: while the speaker transmitted the recording of the voice reading the names, the low frequencies emitted vibrations to the drumsticks, so that the soundtrack simultaneously produced and cancelled the sounds of the names.

Delving deeper into the original concept of the doldrums as a physical and mental locus of the immobility that accompanies unforeseeable events, Sala then used references to the history of art, music, and popular culture in what can be identified as a further group of works within this broad “family.” In Still life in the Doldrums (d’après Cézanne) (2015) the wooden drumsticks are customized so that the ends that should be held by the drummer look like two human calf bones, while a composition made up of four human skulls hangs from the ceiling above the drum. Arranged to form a pyramid, the skulls constitute a citation of Paul Cézanne’s Pyramid of Skulls (1901). The painting is one of the works in which the master’s exploration of still life, and in particular the genre of memento mori or vanitas painting, reveals an anguished obsession with the fleetingness of life and the possible awareness of his approaching death. Sala preserves the expressive pictorial quality of the original by painting the skulls in subtle shades of ivory with burnished nuances. The stark message of Cézanne’s memento mori is somehow amplified by the way in which the sculptural group, hung on thin nylon threads, sways in response to the movement of the drumsticks. Moments of immobility alternate with vigorous action triggered by the vibrations and the noises — some audible and others inaudible — emitted by the soundtrack that forms part of the work. Opening up to multiple twists, the soundtrack includes a free rearrangement of Arnold Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1899), composed shortly before Cézanne’s painting, and snatches of music from Tom and Jerry cartoons. Composed by Scott Bradley, a former pupil of Schönberg in California, these tunes contributed to the success of Walt Disney’s creation. The fact that Disney was born in 1901, the year of Cézanne’s painting, is a further coincidence that becomes meaningful in Sala’s association. Besides the evident presence of different human skulls, Still life in the Doldrums (Don’t Explain) (2015) differs from the work described above in terms of sound content.

While retaining some of Bradley’s tunes, Sala adds excerpts from the jazz song Don’t Explain (1946) by Billy Holiday and from the cover version by Nina Simone (1964), a reference to the fact that jazz was established as a musical genre at the turn of the century, when Cézanne painted his skulls. Both of the above works respond to questions Sala asked himself: “How can a doldrum play a still life? How can immobility activate something that must by its very nature remain motionless?” Well aware that he is entering an area on the borderline of paradox, he also harnesses the physical potentialities offered by the sculptural form employed, which enables him through its development in the round to show the back of the still life: the hidden side that the painting cannot show.

A later group of works, with greater importance now attached to the gravity-defying use of space in mid-air, features snare drums hung from the ceiling upside-down so that the playing surface is visible to the viewers below. The titles of this 2015 group, including Moth in the Doldrums (Overtone Oscillations), Moth in B-flat, Moth in D and Transfigured Moth, all refer to the moth, an insect that the artist finds interesting for its close relationship with the butterfly and preference for nocturnal rather than diurnal activity. These works are also characterized by increased complexity of the sound component. For Moth in B-flat, Moth in D and Transfigured Moth, the basis of the soundtrack is once again Schönberg’s early composition Verklärte Nacht, which interests Sala as belonging to the tonal period of the Austrian master, who then went on to develop atonal music, becoming one of the most important practitioners of Expressionism in the musical sphere. Exploring the musical structure devised by Schönberg for Verklärte Nacht, whose initially unfavorable reception was due to the use of a chord not contemplated in the treatises on harmony of the period, in each work of the Moth group Sala pursues his investigations differently. In Transfigured Moth, for example, he isolates the moments in which a new tone appears. Here he uses a procedure based on the principle of the twelve-tone technique, otherwise known as atonal theory, developed by Schönberg in his maturity. What does not change is the way in which the artist isolates the notes that will make up his soundtrack in each case. Applying a method that is at variance with the compositional ideas used in Verklärte Nacht and belongs instead to Schönberg’s later work, Sala makes the notes played appear almost in the instant when they are expelled from the composition, triggering en passant the reaction of the drumsticks. Like the unpredictable winds blowing in the equatorial zone of the doldrums, these works expose visitors to multiple trajectories with no possibility of identifying one dominant direction.

In Moth in the Doldrums (Overtone Oscillations) two snare drums are set a few meters apart, one standing on the floor, the other suspended from the ceiling. The source of the sound component is a performance held in London at the Barbican in the summer of 2015. Here Sala collaborated with Anna-Maria Hefele, a specialist in overtone or harmonic singing — a technique originally adopted in Asian philosophical and spiritual practices to attain states of deep meditation, where one voice sings a fundamental note and its overtone at the same time. In this period, while pursuing a number of other projects, as is often the case, Sala also undertook an examination of the history and musical structure of La Marseillaise and The Internationale that led in 2017 to the film Take Over, which is included in AS YOU GO. Making use of the overtone technique, Sala intermingles the two anthems in such a way as to highlight their historical affinity and musical kinship.

In-Between the Doldrums (Pac-Man) (2016) also consists of two snare drums, one standing on the ground, the other hanging from the ceiling. Separated by a few inches gap, due to their proximity, the drumsticks play both of their skins in unison, emitting a solid body of sound that reinforces the power of the piece as a producer of authentic “present moments.” Moreover, both snare drums feature reflective chrome skin, which is here used by Sala for the first time, opening up to an exploration of the concept of the “space in between,” another of his favorite areas of investigation. Placed one above the other, the two chrome skins generate a multiplication of reflections that the artist describes as “an infinity of in-between spaces,” with a visual density that enriches the visitor’s synaesthetic experience.

Chronologically, the next work in the doldrums “family” is Bridges in the Doldrums, described at the beginning of this essay. This piece is followed by 43 Names in the Doldrums (2017). Presented as a snare drum hung from the ceiling, the work is based on a tragic event that took place in Mexico

on September 26, 2014. An attack on a group of about 80 students from Ayotzinapa traveling to a emonstration in Mexico City to commemorate the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 led to a number of deaths and the still unexplained disappearance of 43 students, as well as arrests by the local police. In Sala’s work, the names of the missing students are read out by a female voice and transmitted by the speaker inside the snare drum. Because of the low frequencies contained in the spoken words, the drum skin vibrates and triggers the drumsticks, whose rat-a-tat prevents the names from being heard. Not unlike Names in the Doldrums, the work referring to the children killed in the Gaza Strip, 43 Names in the Doldrums sends a clear message, reiterating the use of political pressure to silence any talk of tragic events and exposing its coercive nature.

Conceived as a site-specific installation for Kaldor Public Art Projects in Sydney, Australia, The Last Resort (2017) is the most ambitious of the doldrums works created by the artist so far. It consists of 38 snare drums with reflecting surfaces hung from the ceiling of an outdoor pavilion overlooking the city’s majestic bay on Observatory Hill, a strategic vantage point already known to the Aborigine peoples, and previously the site of Fort Philip, built in 1800 as part of the first defensive works of the Sydney penal colony. As in the previous works, the snare drums are specially altered and, in this case, each fitted with two speakers, a low-frequency and a mid-range one. Reflecting on the early days of the colonial occupation with the arrival of Captain James Cook in Botany Bay in January 1770, followed by the First Fleet of eleven ships carrying convicts as well as officers and their families in 1788, Sala uses Mozart’s almost contemporary Clarinet Concerto in

A major, K. 622 (1791) as a soundtrack. Once again, he alters the music on the basis of precise rules, derived in this case from a reading of the diary of James Bell, a precious historical source again dating from the early days of the British colonization of Australia. Written in 1838, the diary records the epic voyage of its 20-year-old author, kept at sea for six long months instead of the expected 130 days by a series of misfortunes and unexpected setbacks, exposed to all kinds of weather conditions as well as unimaginable situations of corruption and immorality on board. Sala replaces Mozart’s original indications of tempo with observations on wind strength drawn from Bell’s diary, an extraordinary coming-ofage story that narrates the author’s ever-closer contact with the degeneration of most of his traveling companions. The resulting melody was then played by an orchestra and recorded by Sala with separate microphones for each musician. These tracks were installed in the upside-down snare drums, which were arranged in such a way that their positions reflected a possible orchestra playing in the pavilion.

Sala sees his alteration of Mozart’s concerto as a sort of poetic deterioration due to the great length of a hard and exhausting voyage like the one made by Bell and the early settlers. As he wrote in his notes on the work, “I wanted to imagine how a fictional journey through the winds, the waves, and the water currents of the high seas would affect a musical masterpiece of the age of Enlightenment; what would become of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto if it were to float and drift like a message in a bottle, until washed ashore after a long voyage?” Picking up the echoes of a distant past, the insistence on the concept of corruption that shapes the work also captures the tragic impact of colonial domination in a land where the reiteration of sounds and songs in their original form is an integral part of the spiritual culture of the Aborigines, according to a sacred ritual bond that enables them to create creation anew every time they sing.

TEXTS AND SCRIPTS BY THE ARTIST

Déjeuner avec Marubi, 1997

Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe is fed into a sewing machine so that the nude woman on the canvas is dressed in the traditional clothes of Albanian peasant women: a play on the traditions and taboos of a people.

Intervista (Finding the Words), 1998

(Transcript of video. Original language Albanian. English subtitles)

Tirana, 1998

Anri Sala: Mum, I have a surprise for you.

Valdet Sala: I’m wary of your surprises.

AS: Come sit down! I was unpacking my things from the moving boxes and I found a reel of film.

VS: What a surprise! I didn’t know we had this film. It’s from the time I was a militant.

Enver Hoxha, regime ruler

VS: So that’s your surprise?

AS: Are you moved?

VS: I don’t think so.

AS: Do you remember? What year was it?

VS: In ‘77, I think. 20 years ago.

AS: What was it?

VS: The Albanian Youth Congress.

AS: How old were you?

VS: I’m 52 now... minus 20... I was 32.

AS: Do you remember what you were saying in the interview?

VS: No. I’d be curious to know.

AS: There’s no soundtrack.

VS: Too bad the sound is lost. I don’t remember, but... Oh, Pushkin! It’s Pushkin Lubonia.

AS: Is he still in Albania?

VS: I think so. Funny, I don’t remember him interviewing me.

AS: Hello, is this Mr Lubonia’s residence? May I speak to Pushkin? This is Anri Sala, Valdet’s son. I think you know her. I’m a film student in Paris. I found an interview with my mother from the late ‘70s in which you figure. I’d like to meet you and film an interview, if possible. Because you were present and you can help me find the text. No, it’s not for television! It’s a personal project. It’s for a film school assignment.

Pushkin Lubonja: I did over 2,000 interviews. What could I tell you! In all my interviews, even the one with your mother, my questions were foreseeable. Just like all the answers. Even the TV audiences could predict the contents of the interview. The questions were set in advance. You could only give positive answers.

Todi Lubonja: What happened to the sound?

AS: I only found the picture.

TL: And why isn’t there any colour?

AS: The film is in black and white.

TL: Let me have a look. I’ll tell you which Congress it is.

Liri Lubonja: You can tell from the First Secretary.

TL: It might be ‘78. We were gone by then.

LL: Just as I said, we have to see who the Secretary was: if it was Mero or Monari or Bardhi.

TL: Pirro, you old devil! God rest your soul.

LL: And that’s Leka! That looks like Pipi.

TL: Where?

LL: Behind Fiqirete.

TL: I don’t think so.

AS: Then you weren’t at this Congress?

LL: No, it was held after our expulsion. We didn’t even know it was taking place.

Liri and Todi Lubonja were sentenced to 16 years in prison, having been members of the Party’s Central Committee at the head of the Albanian Youth Union.

AS: You were the soundman for the interview. And now you’re a taxi driver.

Taxi driver: I’m one of the pioneers of the Kinostudio. I worked there for more than thirty years. I wasn’t fired. I left for financial reasons. My pay was ridiculously low. Prices were rising, so I bought this car and became a cabbie.

AS: Why is there no sound in the interview?

Td: We didn’t film then as you film now. We didn’t have synched sound here. Picture and soundtrack were separate: the camera on the one side, the tape recorder on the other. That’s why the sound is missing. It was probably lost. At the time, I was terrified of there being a technical hitch during interviews with the bosses of the nomenclature. Nowadays, there’s the fear of the street... robberies, muggings, it’s another kind of fear. I prefer this new fear because it has an end. The other was endless; it only stopped with death.

“This... meeting... was... held... to... clearly... express... the political... situation... of the country... in terms of the struggle against imperialism, revisionism... and the two superpowers, which is only possible with the Marxist-Leninist Party. And only if youth unites its efforts under the guardianship of the Marxist-Leninist Party...”

“Examining the current political situation, not only in certain countries, but around the world as well, and by discussing problems, we can appreciate the importance of a people’s revolutionary movement.”

VS: I don’t believe this! It’s absurd! I just can’t believe it! It’s just spouting words. There’s no sense to it. I know how to express myself!

AS: Look, Mum. I had deaf-mutes decipher it. They’re the only ones who can. I’ll read the subtitles, while you read your lips.

VS: It’s not the political view, but it makes no sense.

AS: Read your lips, Mum! “...was very clear...” “...in terms of... the struggle...” “...against imperialism and the two superpowers...”

VS: But it’s gibberish!

AS: “...with the backing of the Marxist-Leninist Party...” “...if the youth pools its efforts...”

VS: Do I talk that way?

AS: “...the guardianship of the Marxist-Leninist Party...” “...it will achieve victory...”

VS: In this struggle.

AS: - “...in this struggle...” “Even if we follow the current political situation...”

VS: Where?

AS: “... in certain countries...”

VS: Not at all!

AS: There aren’t any cuts in the film!

VS: Those aren’t my words.

AS: Sure, they are! Read your lips! I’ll read the text.

AS: When did you do this interview?

VS: It was after a Communist Youth Meeting.

AS: What about?

VS: About the world revolution, so that all men would be equal, without oppression or exploitation. It still has a nice ring to it!

AS: Did you believe in that ideal?

VS: I often asked myself those questions... Where does compromise with power and one’s self begin, and rebellion end?

AS: How do you feel about only deaf-mutes reading into your past?

VS: It’s an irony of fate!

AS: Do you see anything in common?

VS: Yes, we were living in a deaf and dumb system where we only spoke with one mouth and one voice. It’s symbolic, because in certain milieus things were less strict. Among us, things were more open. You wrote a poem at nine about your fear of politics. How could you have written it, if it had been against our family’s beliefs? Things weren’t all black and white. We could live, fall in love, have children... We thought we’d change the world, and little by little, we lost everything. Our generation was the victim of past errors. Whereas our parents were luckier. They’d just won the war, and everything was possible.

Long live the revolutionary spirit!

Vote for the Party on 20 September!

VS: The positive side is, you can learn from our experience... in order to do things differently. If I could go back, I wouldn’t act differently. I believed in what I was doing – that much I can say. I really believed.

For you, my motherland,

the loveliest song

I sing for you from the bottom of my heart.

For your mountains and wild valleys,

for you motherland,

where I live happily today.

You are so beautiful

and full of the greatness

of an impregnable fortress...

LL: I think there were several kinds of people. Those who knew what was going on... and those who continued to cling to their ideals. Your mother was a young militant, honest, sincere. I don’t think she acted out of hypocrisy. She believed in those ideals, she really did. Then came the great disenchantment. We hit rock bottom in a system meant to create the ideal society.

TL: When someone couldn’t find fish at the market, and he’d complain, he’d be tried for challenging authority and sentenced for threatening the State. So they’d throw him in prison. Had I asked him: “Why are you here?” “I complained about the lack of fish.” That’s how they legalized injustice, oppression and violence. We lived under 50 years of dictatorship. Dictatorships don’t expose evil, they hide it. They hide crime. Dictatorships don’t provide security, they impose a false sense of security.

VS: The commandments of communism were to be honest, social-minded, idealistic, energetic, optimistic, etc. I was all of those things. I am still that way. And I still work for that today. So that society can be more social-minded, more attentive to the individual, more humane.

AS: And the enthusiasm in the archive footage was real?

VS: I can talk to you about concrete experience, about the efforts of young people. We built all the orchard terraces. We built the northern roads. We built the railroads. It was real, Anri, because we were building. Then there was the phoney enthusiasm... The hysteria! The delirious enthusiasm of congresses and ceremonies. It was a forced enthusiasm, which had lost all its significance. It was a crowd’s hysteria for its leader, who was like an icon. The farther away the leader was, the more mythic he seemed. The closer you got, the more banal he became, until he lost all significance.

AS: Mum, does me filming this bother you?

VS: I don’t know. If you weren’t my son, I don’t know if I’d have agreed. I have mixed feelings. I can’t give you a simple answer. Personally it doesn’t bother me, since I’m talking about a reality and my rapport with that reality, which belongs to the past, and concerns the present as well.

Albania is on the brink of civil war. Tanks are moving towards the southern cities held by armed rebel forces. The city of Vlora is torn by violent clashes, which claimed two more lives in the last few hours. The rebels demand the resignation of President Berisha just re-elected by the parliament. Albanians are preparing for their first cease-fire since the last world war.

Their money vanished in the local pyramid company bankruptcies. They led the revolt of the small investors. Hospital staff didn’t know which way to turn nor how to treat victims of beatings or stray bullets.

VS: I’m frightened because I don’t see a way out. I don’t understand what’s happening anymore. I’m frightened. I’m very confused! When I talk about the future, I’m thinking about those close to me, but also the country’s future. The recent events have crushed lots of hopes. It’s as if a destructive force has swept away all constructive energy. I’m frightened. I’m frightened for you and me. For me what matters most is that you and your sister have a future. That’s my greatest desire. My desire for a future for Albania is just as great. That’s logical, since I can’t see you apart from this country. If this country has a future, you’ll have one too. But if it doesn’t, neither will you. As they say in Albania: “Ask for one thing, and you’ll get two.”

I think we’ve passed on to you the ability to doubt. Because you must always question the truth.

Nocturnes, 1999

(Transcript)

Jacques: I love all of them, but some I love more. I love the fossorochromis rostratus, the blue one in the middle, a bit dark, with his women with five spots along their bodies. Hup, she’s just turned around. I like their mouths because they have a kind of permanent smile. But the mouth isn’t for smiling, it’s to go eating in the sand. They stick their heads in and filter everything, and then out through the gills, keeping the food. There are so many things to eat in sand.

Denis: When you’ve got a gun, you’ve got to take care of it. There, they tell you: you work with your gun, you sleep with it, you have sex with it. In the shower you turn it upside down and cover it with a towel. A gun is normal, so when you get here and you don’t have it, it changes you. You have problems with people. I started young, when I was eighteen, as soon as I was an adult I signed up. I was eighteen in July and I left in October. For a boy, life begins. So when you come back, you remember it and think about everything you’ve done over the last four years, when you did unusual things. You can’t manage to say to yourself: on the 24th of July 1995 I killed four people. You think about it and you think about it, and then you remember the four people you killed and the way you did it.

You see the father come out of the house, but you can’t see inside the house, only its shape. Then you see him go off. From above, you see him go to some other guys who are part of the militia. He picks up a gun, makes a sign and then it all comes down and you watch the bullet go. That’s what stops you sleeping. They don’t warn you about that in training.

J: I’ve always felt like a Martian. Do you want some more? Ever since I was little I always felt like a Martian. Little Martians. Black ones, white ones, grey ones. The awful way people look at them. I’ve noticed that a lot, and it scares me. I wanted to turn this into a shop, but I’ve stopped all that. I thought, it’ll be great, people can come and see the fishes’ parents. Then one day five people turned up and all the fish swam away, hiding in the corners. I said to myself, that’s awful.

Some of them can’t handle it, that look. They stay in the corner and they usually get sick quite quickly.

D: If I remember right, I killed that person on the 13th of March 1995 at 5:28 in the evening. I remember everything. That one shocked me the most. It stops me sleeping every time I think of his face. It’s a composite of that face – always from one side, then from the other and then facing me with a hole in the head.

After four months, they’ve made you perfect. For four months you learn it all and then they send you off. You have a plan, to go and get some information, take some notes. Look around a bit, and after three weeks you come back to base camp... and you write your report, you rest a bit, you put on the blue helmet instead of the beret. You drive the trucks, go and get the mail. That killed me, going to get the mail, what a laugh!

And the snipers’ shots go ping-ting-ting-ting. It’s great music! But I can’t even wish it on the enemy, really. I can’t.

You see, it eats away at your life, it’s in your face all at once. You can’t live normally anymore. So you hold on to what you’ve got left. For me, it’s the Playstation.

J: You can see it when you put a new one in. If you put a new fish into a well-balanced tank, where each fish has found his space, without any precautions, the fish won’t last an hour. There are always small tensions, so to stop them becoming sources of stress, the fish spend their time avoiding each other, just looking at each other.

The sound here is everywhere and it’s very stressful when sometimes it stops. It’s awful. When the sound stops, I say to myself, oh shit, it’s a disaster, they’re all going to die. There’s no more air, there’s no more oxygen. Panic. In the middle of the night, at three in the morning, I wake up and come down. I can’t hear the noise anymore, I can’t hear the sound.

D: Basically, human beings aren’t violent, they just like to dominate. You’ve got the brain’s hemisphere you use, but violence is on the other side, true violence, barbarity, the capacity to destroy. They shave your head and show you films. Not the kind of film you get on TV. Different ways to kill. They put the information in and it becomes a reflex. And to stop you feeling remorse, they inject you with something that makes you forget you’re a human being.

J: It’s always been like that: by stages, you have to... How do you find the right social balance? How do you do it? I observe things and think to myself, look, I’m not saying that humans are the same, but sometimes I think, well, there are similarities and to relate to human beings I still need to use other means.

D: Basically, I’ve got to stop. If I don’t and keep it closed up inside me, it will grow inside me until it explodes, and that’s when it gets dangerous. Now I have my two lives, as it should be. In the evening I’m a kid. I put on my sports clothes and go and train in the park, then I come back, I have a shower and then I become a real kid in front of the Playstation... and then I turn it off... and go and live my day.

Byrek, 2000

(Text on slide projection – English version)

When I was a kid, my grandmother would get up early in the morning to knead dough made with flour, salt and water. By the time I got up, the dough would already be on the table. I was passionately fond of watching my grandmother’s hands prepare the flaky pastry for byrek. I wasn’t old enough to go to school, so would climb on a chair and watch her roll out the flaky pastry with a rolling pin. The byrek was big and my grandmother would always use the biggest of our baking trays. For holidays, she would hide a lucky coin in the byrek, which would be cut into five pieces. There was always a second coin hidden in her hand, and if someone else found the lucky coin in his piece of byrek, my grandmother would “help” me search for it in mine, discreetly slipping in the second coin. I was a child and I was delighted to find the lucky coin in my piece of byrek. We had a small flat and I used to sleep in her room, our beds adjoining in an “L” shape. I used to have nightmares, so to keep me from being afraid, I would ask her to hold my hand in her hand, all night long. I didn’t know which of her hands it was, but it made no difference to me. In the morning, when I got up she was never there. Then I grew up, and when I went to school, the dough would already have been placed on the table, covered with a fine layer of flour. When I returned at noon, my grandmother would be rolling out the flaky pastry with her rolling pin and I would see the last balls of dough disappear in her hands and become almost transparent. We used to eat at 2 p.m., when everybody was home. At the time there were five of us: my grandmother, my mother, my father, my sister and me. Later on, my sister left the country to continue her studies abroad. Sometime later, my grandmother took a smaller baking tray to cook byrek for four. I wasn’t often there to watch the pastry being made, and even less often to see it being rolled out. Most of the time, I used to eat my piece of byrek cold because I came home late. Then I left. I went abroad. I guess my grandmother continued to cook byrek for three, in the smallest baking tray. I felt sad about

this tray, because my grandmother had never had to use it before.

Now my grandmother has stopped cooking byrek. My sister and I are still abroad. Our grandmother’s lucky coin brought us luck. My parents don’t eat with her because their working hours have changed. My grandmother feels very weak now. She says she can’t eat byrek anymore, it hurts her mouth.

On 25th of March, this year, she mailed me the recipe.

Uomoduomo, 2000

The perspective of the cathedral[20] could perpetuate time until the vanishing point, if it weren’t for the old man nodding in loops. Transgressing the linearity of time, he dares the divine perpetuity to become his own vanishing point.

Bus 836 BFC 918 (named visual), 2000

Yesterday night, I saw a bus named visual with blue letters written on his white skin. It was raining; only a few people in the street, most of them runners with their earphones on. The bus was empty, licence plate 836 BFC 918, no driver, nothing besides the flashing warning lights. Three TV monitors, visible behind the windows, were showing a movie to the emptiness inside. I don’t know what exactly, since the windows were dressed and I could only see a blurred rendition. I stopped but I couldn’t see well. All I could notice was that there were subtitles.

This is the kind of situation that no one takes for real, but makes it too much for a fiction as well.

Today I recalled the situation of the white skinned bus called visual, motionless somewhere in Paris with his warning lights. Inside, the images were shown to no audience, total vacuity, only a subtitled movie (may be originally in French?) inhabiting the inner space. Nobody inside, the only people around were passers-by with earphones on.

It was not in the bus nature to be motionless, nor in the seats’ nature to be unoccupied, nor in the movie’s nature to be public-less. The only clue fitting to the scene were the warning lights, doubled by their reflections on the wet street.

A bus that doesn’t run, seats without people, a film without audience... A total visual dysfunction, if it wasn’t for the people running with their earphones on.

It Has Been Raining Here, 2001

(Wall text)

No doubt it doesn’t move them. No comments on the everlasting dreary evidence as they enter the city. Back from the beach they carry sunshades on their burned shoulders. The crowd leaves the train-station, walks on the wet ground and makes its way to the first line of buildings and cranes, amidst smoking garbage tanks and waste. The sound of their steps becomes diluted in the familiar surroundings. The rare words they exchange break the roaring silence: “It has been raining here.”

Arena, 2001

The Tirana Zoo. The landscape around it has changed over the past years. The modest park surrounding the pavilion is losing ground. Urban life is invading the rural landscape. The town – its nearest parts were nowhere in sight before – is quickly approaching. Dogs lie in the area all around the glass walls of the corridor. The corridor is a transparent belt that offers a 360° view and separates the two animal worlds. The main noises come from behind the camera, from the inner circle of the corridor. The pavilion is composed of about ten identical cage-rooms that offer a poor sampling of local or exotic animal species – those that survived the mutations, the unstable transition of the town. The camera maps the anxiety of the present.

Missing Landscape, 2001

Each time the ball goes away, the goalkeeper follows it, and disappears into the “missing landscape.” When he returns, he always enters through the goal to get back into the playground. His action is reminiscent of the theatre convention where an actor moves across the different spaces of an interior, always using a doorway, even though there are no walls or physical boundaries separating the rooms on the stage. Each time the goalkeeper enters the playground through the goal, he acknowledges a space within a space, as if he were unconsciously cutting the playground off the world surrounded by the mountains. He simultaneously plays a game and acts a play! There are few lifelike moments of tension and violence, receiving a stone when throwing the ball, when the children act like the grownups living in the “missing landscape” between the playground and the mountains.

Promises, 2001

(Wall text)

“...Next he went after Capone himself, giving Scarface’s personal chef $10,000 to dump prussic acid in Capone’s soup. The chef backed out at the last minute, telling his chief of the plot while tears streamed down his face. Capone allowed the man to live but changed his kitchen help immediately. Scarface was next told that Aiello had placed a $50,000 bounty on him for everyone bold enough to kill Capone. Said Capone to his then bodyguard, Louis “Little New York” Campagna, ‘Nobody puts a price on my head and lives’.”[21]

I asked friends if they could say, “Nobody puts a price on my head and lives.”

Blindfold, 2002

15 minutes at dusk. The sun hits the shimmering metallic structures of empty billboards blinding the view and consequently censoring sight. Slowly, the sun passes away and the light fades, letting loose the image. The space behind the billboards expands in a simultaneous projection of two shots in two cities, which move slowly, though not as slowly as the sun.

Ghostgames, 2002

Ghostgames is a film and a game. It’s similar to soccer, but here one plays with a ghost crab instead of a ball. You have to locate the right time and place where this kind of soccer can meet this kind of ball. Ghost crabs are not found everywhere. They spend most of the year in their burrows and generally come out in great numbers only during the summer season at new moon, when the tide is low. Introducing this game during a night walk with flashlights along a sandy beach[22], I wanted to see how it feels when the rules meet the uncontained, the rational meets the irrational, the wish to play and control meets the loss of control and the never intended.

Each player has a flashlight that he can skillfully use in order to manipulate the crab. When the spotlights center on the ghost crab, they start operating it: the crab first stops, then tries to make its way into the darkness away from the pursuing light, to the sea or into its burrow under the sand.

Like in an unusual film, I wanted to replace the “making sense” action with the playing action and exchange the script for the abstract rules of the game. The game fictionalizes the space. Ghost crabs appear as locomotive creations under continual chasing and manipulation by the players. One could even imagine the light stream and the crabs as a continuation of the same body: the player.

These are the rules: All physical contact is forbidden except the touch of the light. One cannot play with the same crab for longer than two minutes because on average a ghost crab can only run up to three minutes. One cannot step back. Light-pushing the crab inbetween the legs of the other counts as a goal!

While researching for the work and a possible location, the artist corresponded with a number of scientists, including Daniel Ritchoff. Excerpts from that correspondence follow.

Sun, 23 Jun 2002

... between an art project and scientific research. I imagine the first image of the film to be something totally dark with the faraway spots of flashlights. The sound will introduce the space; sound from the ocean! It could be a long shot, let the figures approach. The focus goes on and off and looks as if the image breathes. Sometimes it could look like something unreal, because what we see is still unclear. The film is the passage of two people with flashlights along a few hundred meters of beach. The spotlight stops or pushes the ghost crabs away to the sea or into their holes. There, the crossing gets more animated; it turns into a game. A game like a sort of football with no physical touch, no pushes, no violence, no physical violence. Light pushes! I’m interested in the process of invention in the game; a game with lots of subtleties, complexity and obscurity. There is no touch but the touch of the light. The players try to push the crab with the light; they try to push it in-between the legs of each other. When that happens it’s a goal, which is difficult because the ghost crabs mainly run to their holes or the water. The goal justifies the actions and helps in recognizing it as a game. An important aspect is that there should be no field, but a continuation of the field. When a ghost crab flees, the players continue the crossing with flashlights; they don’t stop play with each ghost crab. They stop once in a while. The end of the game could come because of a possible end of territory, maybe a small waterway, which would look black again, so the image turns black. The sound will have its own development. Besides the direct sounds, one idea is that with the crossing and the continuation of the game, more ghost crabs get into their underground burrows because of the flashlights, so we could develop an underground sound, which becomes more and more present. I know that the ghost crabs make a sort of noise when they dig their tunnels. Things are not yet clear in detail. Every time I’m working on a project, I’m interested in the development, the continuing changes in its understanding due to exchange, experience and questioning. I’d like to know a bit more about how the ghost crabs behave or any information you think is useful (once you read my thoughts on the film). I wanted to know more about the way the ghost crabs look at the things around them. They have these “elevated” eyes that see all around (is it 360° at the same time?). I learned that their eyes couldn’t see above them (the birds are dangerous!). I’m sending you an image as an attachment. It’s a daylight image showing a ghost crab under the sand. The project is a night project, but I wanted to know if this sort of image is common by day. If the project takes place in the US Shackleford Banks, then I’d like to ask you a few more questions later about the boat trip to get there, electric power, water etc. A risk for the project could be the beauty of the images. I’m sure they’ll be beautiful, but it’s not my purpose. My purpose is the whole process of the invention of the game, the crossing, the push of the light, and maybe other things to discover. That’s the reason why a scientific knowledge and approach would be more then helpful for the project... to be continued. Best wishes, Anri.

Sun, 23 Jun 2002

Hi Anri, well, sounds kind of interesting, your idea. I’m not sure, though, whether the ghost crabs will do you the favor of participating in the game. I imagine that they’ll run to their burrows as fast as they notice the lights or whatever strange thing is going on at the beach. So you may just see some fast shadows in the distance and as soon as you get closer there’s no ghost crab to be seen. Getting your ideas on film would sound even more improbable to me.

Sun, 23 Jun 2002

Dear Martin, I think it could work, since I experienced myself this game-situation in Bahia, Brazil, one night as I was walking by the shore with a flashlight. The light stops the crab first, and then the crab tries to leave. If you put the spotlight against the direction of the movement, the crab stops again. Anyway, I know it will be complicated. It’s difficult for me to say if there is a main idea behind it, at least not a literal one. As I told you, it’s more about this situation where there is no physical push or contact or violence, but only the light plays all these roles. But with some more time, I’ll understand and share it better. Best wishes, Anri.

Sun, 23 Jun 2002

Well then, let’s hope that the Chilean crabs behave the same or at least similar to the Brazilian crabs. Hopefully this analogy works better for crabs than for soccer players – the Chileans didn’t even make it to Japan... Best wishes, Martin

Mon, 24 Jun 2002

Hi, Anri. I can have crabs be in predictable places if that helps. Yes and they can see above perfectly well. Crabs do not usually let themselves get in that situation. They will bury like that if you disturb then and make it so they can’t get back to their hole. That crab was either disturbed or is very sick. Best, Dan

Tue, 25 Jun 2002

Dear Martin, I arrived this morning, such a long journey: Paris-Frankfurt-Buenos Aires-Santiago. (Here it’s too cold.)

Fri, 28 Jun 2002

Maybe sleep near the car. I think nothing should happen, but a little bit of caution is always useful. Martin

Wed, 3 Jul 2002

Dear Dan, the situation looks perfect, right season and climate, very high density of crabs. P.S. I’m thinking that the shooting would take place at the beginning of August.

Wed, 03 Jul 2002

Anri, I’m not sure that I know precisely how you plan to play your game, or what you have in mind, exactly, but we can get our crabs to move at night. There are burrows at high tide and then others inland. Crabs release larvae on new and full moons – then lots of females show up right after dark at high tide; that’s when the highest densities of crabs occur at the water’s edge. Since it’s high tide, the waves are also biggest. Best, Dan

Wed, 03 Jul 2002

Dear Dan, my agenda says that the full moon will be the 24th of July or the 22nd of August (too late for me). But you say new moon as well. This is the phases of the moon, universal times, I found on the net:

NEW MOON FIRST QUARTER FULL MOON LAST QUARTER

JULY 10 10 26 JULY 17 4 47 JULY 24 9 07 AUG. 1 10 22

AUG. 8 19 15 AUG. 15 10 12 AUG. 22 22 29 AUG. 31 2 31

It means that we have new moon the 8th of August. I have to seriously start to prepare the travel. Best, Anri.

Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2), 2002

What moved me most about Mihajlo (a young man from Belgrade) was the unyielding detachment he felt towards what hit him: that strange event known as the “surgical strike.” Though it did not place his life in danger, at night it stopped him living it, creating a sense of ennui.

As he sat beside the window in the evenings, this ennui made him want to kill time — the thing you have too much of when you’re trapped in others’ affairs. There he listened to the sound of the air strikes and memorized it, unaware that one day he would bring it to a recording studio in Paris. With almost anthropological objectivity and accuracy, he reproduced the exact sound of the Tomahawk missiles, which halfway down seem to hold their breath for a moment before launching themselves on their earthly target.

Dammi i Colori, 2003

(Transcript)

When I first showed the city footage in Poughkeepsie, Liam Gillick said to me, “Anri, tell me the truth. Tell me that this city doesn’t exist. Please tell me that you don’t have an artist-Mayor friend?” Edi Rama: The city was dead. It looked like a transit station where one could stay only if waiting for something.

It looked like a body that kept growing silently older, where all the turbulence of the riots and the events that occurred took place as if in an alien setting. It was like being in a place that swallowed up everything without being affected.

This is a question of finding out how this city can become habitable and how to transform it from a city where you are doomed to live by fate into a city where you choose to live.

The color was a process that made it possible to experience time as a common element.

All this landscape, modified through the use of color, is a landscape that reflects the decades-long debasement of the individual through the indifference of the State.

The question here is that color has also another role. It must bind together all the volumes that have been brutally and individually added to the original surface, not by the hand of an artist, but by the anonymous hands of the residents who have had to expand their living space and who normally, when building their balconies, or when adding another floor or a shop, were not concerned that the form that would be created by their brutal action should be in harmony with the form that would be created as a result of the violation of the building surface by the neighbor, or the neighbor of the neighbor.

It is not a matter of what color you may want to have the balcony; it is not a matter of what color you may want this or that building, because that would be a question of trying to add up all the tastes and find the golden mean, which would be a gray.

What we have done is not an outcome of democratization, but more an avant-garde of democratization; this is rather a process that precedes and co-travels with the democratization of this country, this community, than a process that is closed in on itself and which sets a model.

This does not mean that it should also happen to other cities. It does not mean either that other cities should envy this city.

It would make no sense for this to be in a city that establishes communication and relations with people in other ways quite natural and satisfactory for them. This is the difference.

Color has an impact on the intensification of the rhythm of breathing, the breaking of a dust screen, and the creation of a new era for the city.

There is a paradox here, because it is the poorest country in Europe, rife with problems, and I do not think there is any other country in Europe, even the richest, where people discuss colors so passionately and collectively.

The hottest discussion in the coffee bars, in homes, in the streets was what the colors are doing to us. I think that the ambition to make this city a city of choice and not of destiny is a utopia in itself.

I think that a city where things develop normally might wear colors like a dress, not have them as organs. In a way, colors here replace the organs.

They are not part of the dress. That kind of city would wear colors like a dress or like a lipstick.

I do not know how it is for others, but the relationship between the Mayor and his elector is like the relationship between the artist and the spectator.

It’s a very stressful relationship. It’s a daily effort under people’s very eyes, which after all aims at people’s hearts.

The colors I use are no longer an element, or a frustrating presence within four walls that comes back to me with the question of whether it is worthwhile painting at all today; if my painting makes any sense, if it makes sense that I have settled in a foreign capital and paint. Who am I to paint and why should I paint and not do something else instead?

What is important to me is that I am done with this debate.

I am not interested in it any more, therefore I do not deem it necessary to respond to these questions.

Take some red color from the car’s break light and throw it out in the dark. It looks nice.

Time after time, 2003

Is it possible to produce a visible manifestation of loss? What is the appearance of what’s not entirely there? There must be a singular way of inscribing beings or things in the present so that they embody simultaneously what they used to be and no longer are, consequently representing their disappearance in progress.

Three Minutes, 2004

I remember my surprise when I learned how a change in the relationships between temperature, the speed of particles and condensation, can produce from a given quantity of matter new matter of different qualities. I wondered to what extent the general situation of the world’s daily affairs depends on the fact that we have an average temperature between 36° and 38°. How would the world be if we were suddenly 39° one day? Could an excess of light result in an excess of information? I selected an ordinary object that has a singular task – its reason to exist – and filmed it performing this task in controlled light conditions.

Edited frame by frame, the film gradually strips the object of its normative associations. I was interested in creating a new efficiency for the object, one that would resist initial expectations: the very reason why it was manufactured, or even invented, its raison d’etre. New qualities surface and provide new information about the object. The cymbal reflects the light and develops a new competency, with which it would not previously have been credited. During this new momentum, the cymbal defies its original usefulness, suggesting reconsideration “under a new light.”

Now I See, 2004

A band writes a song of their choice, following a few instructions. To facilitate the understanding of the project, I call it song N°1. When performed on stage, the song’s personality should incite expressive actions and gesticulations, so that if one were to close one’s ears and stop listening, one could see the music and visually grasp its rhythm, as if it were music for the eyes.

Song N°1 acts like a film script that determines when the lead vocalist sings, how they hold the microphone and move across, how the percussionist hits the drum set and when the guitar player jumps around. In short, Song N°1 triggers all the actions and inspires everything that is seen in the picture, with one exception: as the performance unfolds, a dog-shaped balloon – part of the modest stage decoration – takes off and starts floating in midair, as if carried by mysterious sound frequencies.

The lyrics of the song could convey what we have been watching and suggest the idea of a rupture in the narrative. As the song is about to end, the performance reaches mayhem. The musicians jump around without any mutual sense or concord; with one of them lying on the floor. As they do so, the dog-shaped balloon makes a landing amid their erratic movements, narrowly avoiding being crushed. Not for long.

The band is asked to write another song. Song N°2 is purposely composed of electronically synthesized low-frequency sounds, complemented by a smooth melody. It has no lyrics, and its slow tempo contrasts with the expressiveness of song N°1.

Whilst the dog-shaped balloon drifts gracefully in midair, the expansive sounds of song N°2 replace the erratic pace of song N°1. Its low frequencies invade the air according to an imaginary pattern. (Incidentally, the low frequencies could be the invisible breath that lifts the dog-shaped balloon and carries it across the murky concert hall).

As the dog-shaped balloon pursues its journey, a growing sense of detachment separates the viewer from the main action of the film: the band’s performance on stage. Progressively, the musicians resemble movie characters whose storyline we can no longer grasp. The steadfast visual rhythm of their performance and the chaos that ensues deliberately contrast with the quietness of song N°2. The dog-shaped balloon is the only entity that continues its journey in harmony with song N°2, which has become the only music for the ears. When a song for the eyes and a song for the ears convene in Now I See, they confront its narrative to allow a greater role to the senses of the viewer.

Làk-kat, 2004

Lak-kat is a term in Wolof (a language spoken in Senegal), that is indicative of those who come from regions where Wolof is not the native tongue. In a manner of speaking, it conveys the lingual other.

Lak-kat (2004) explores the abundance and the bounds of a language that is particularly alert in discerning the different shades between black and white, bright and dark. And yet, Wolof has no words for primary colors, such as red, yellow or blue, having filled the gaps with the French adjectives rouge, jaune and bleu. In this context, I always liked to imagine rouge, jaune and bleu as being Lak-kat words themselves: though originating elsewhere, they’ve found a new home in Wolof.

Over time, in the process of translating Lak-kat into other languages, the video work could become a tool to test and measure the ability of other languages to distinguish and differentiate. Working closely with interpreters who have an adroit comprehension of the intricacies and obscurities that relate languages to geographies and historical contexts, I set out to make visible the evocative divergences that breed within a language. These divergences are especially reflected in those areas where skin color and otherness convene.

Translating a specific Wolof word into British English alongside American English[23] revealed the singularity of two distinctly troubled encounters with colonization and otherness. Pursuing this process with Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese and Angolan Portuguese[24] unveiled additional perspectives that ensue when a language embraces three continents.

Interpreting the same words into Castilian Spanish, as well as the Spanish dialects spoken in Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina,[25] created a richer web of variances and differentiations. In addition, it shed light on another implicit influence: the interpreters and the hushed pertinence of the tone of their skin.

Long Sorrow, 2005

Long Sorrow is set in a building nicknamed Langer Jammer (“long sorrow” or “lamentation”) in Märkisches Viertel, an area in Berlin situated very close to where the Wall used to be. Built between 1965 and 1974, its innovative architectural ideas promoted a different way of living together, aspiring to a new sense of community.

Its construction started immediately after the isolation of West Berlin by the erection of the Wall. Having to accommodate scores of people within a limited space, the western part of the city took bold measures to respond to a sudden housing-shortage crisis. The maxim “urbanity by density” reflected the ambitions of a new era. By 1974, when the development was completed (circa 17,000 apartments were built), it was very poorly received. The press called it a ghetto camouflaged by advanced social and architectural ideas. In hindsight, it is believed that many of the disparaging images that appeared in the press were staged. Rather than a narrative, Long Sorrow is a particular arrangement of tinted situations, colored by moments of tension, gestures and music. Set in a vacant flat on the top floor of “Langer Jammer,” it aims at further lengthening the building by means of a musical scream.

Agassi, 2006

Agassi’s eyes are late. The tennis ball is no longer where it just was. The image projected captures a gap in time, a usually hidden moment, filled here by the delay between the direction of Agassi’s look and the ball’s position. Filming the still image gives this delay a completely new duration.[26] In this case, the duration is one minute, which is 1,440 frames at 24 frames per second. Time is rolling, but nothing is changing.

Except that twice, and each time for three frames long, a round white hole appears on the top-right side of the image, next to the ball, accidentally closer to where Agassi’s eyes are looking. In movies, this white hole is a sign that tells the projectionist that it’s time to change the reel, to preserve continuity. It’s a sign that the audience generally misses. The time between when the first hole disappears and the second one appears is 19 frames, approximately 0.79 seconds, the same time that it takes the ball, after an Agassi serve, to reach and hit the other player’s side of the court.

When one sees the first hole, one “sees” the noise of the ball being hit by the racket and then, with the second hole, it hitting the ground. One gets to feel the time that it takes.

Air Cushioned Ride, 2006

What I call a place is where one remembers having been. A place is not only made of space but also of time; it holds its own qualities, whether they are architecture, sounds or events. Some places have no buildings or dates to be remembered, but they produce their own soundtrack.

I came across a rest area for trucks while driving across Arizona and listening to Baroque music on Arizona Public Radio. As I drove closer, going in circles around the trucks, radio waves from an unknown station playing country music started to interfere with the Baroque chamber music I was listening to. This phenomenon is called “cross modulation” or “a spurious emission”. The different radio waves would swap due to the parked trucks that worked to alternately redirect one piece of music while blocking the other. In the course of a full circle, the music would shift several times, always in the same places. When a truck left, it opened up a new passage in the “truck wall,” creating a potential for a new cross modulation.

A Spurious Emission, 2007

After being transcribed and arranged as a score for Country and Baroque chamber music, the soundtrack of Air Cushioned Ride is reenacted as a live performance in A Spurious Emission. There is an enchanted and yet delusional affinity between the two works. Perceptions of space translate to notions of time; south and north of the trucks in Air Cushioned Ride convert to before and after in the music score of A Spurious Emission.

After Three Minutes, 2007

An invisible hand hits a cymbal situated in a dark room lit by strobe lights. A video camera is filming it. The strobe lights can send up to sixty flashes per second, but the video camera can only record 25 frames a second. There is a loss between what is there to be seen and what the camera can capture, even if our eyes cannot tell the difference. The recorded video misses over half of the reality.

The edited video is later projected in a room at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. The light of the projection acts like a strobe itself, illuminating the gallery every time a glimpse of the glowing cymbal appears in the film. This was captured on security cameras at two frames per second. The newly recorded video once again misses a further portion of the reality while expanding what were initially very short glimpses of the cymbal and giving time a new order.

Overthinking, 2007

(Transcript)

Anri Sala: So, there’s this person that I want to contact, who’s an artist. There are these thousands of images that he collected during his life for the archive, and after his death he wanted them to be available for artists. And now, there’s this project organized by two curators who worked with the archive they organized, and they made it accessible to artists, and have invited different people, including myself, to do something with it. So I went through all these images, where there’s everything about life, images he took himself, images he found, from magazines or from other people. The reason why I’m here is that... he himself organized them into categories, which were architecture, people and historical figures, objects, models, paintings, sculpture, workers and industry, and misery. So there are these two images in the category of architecture, and I was very surprised to see that he put them there... because what I see there is a suicide... How come he put these two images in the category of architecture? So that’s my question.

Medium: Normally with the séance, what we do first is just to make sure that we think, that we think, so... [the medium grasps my hand]. Thank you for being here... Please guide us in our questions and provide us with the answers that you want to provide us with, and I call light around us and light around you. Thank you! Do you have a particular question you want to ask him?

AS: Yes. There’s this person that I want to contact, who’s an artist, who during his life, beside his artwork, he also gathered a huge selection of images... [the wind takes the cards away]. Shall I bring them back?

M: Yes, they would be important, because he keeps trying to do that.

AS: Is it the person that we’re calling?

M: Yes, because he keeps on doing it with a few cards, which is interesting. He likes them. [laughing] Okay, go on with your questions.

AS: Why, why in this sequence of pictures where you see someone throwing himself... how come he put them in ‘architecture’ instead of putting them in ‘misery’ or creating a new category for ‘suicide’. That’s my question.

M: He wasn’t looking at it from the aspect of frame by frame the way we do in life; he’s looking at it from the aspect of a progression of it and I don’t think he was looking at the man, but he was looking at the spirit of that architecture, of the building. You know, certain buildings have souls themselves. You notice the person that’s doing this isn’t dejected; he’s like this [she raises her arms up], you know, it’s not about him, it’s about what made him do that.

AS: What’s different for him between here and here, if it’s not the man...? It‘s not the architecture...?

M: It’s not the architecture.

AS: It’s not the awareness of the people downstairs like...

M: Right! It’s also about the feeling of this building, that’s what I’m trying to get to you, the building.

AS: But what is the building?

M: They’re dealing with something. Like, if you’ve ever been in a building that makes you happy, and then you’ve been in a haunted building, a building that makes you unhappy. It’s not just about the structure of the building, it’s about what happened in that building, it’s about all the things around that building. That’s what he’s trying to say.

AS: Does he remember or does he know where this photographs were taken?

M: [hesitation]

AS: Did he find the images?

M: No!

AS: How did he come to posses these images?

M: They were given to him. There are other images, not many, but there are other images.

AS: Of the same place?

M: No, they’re different. But the other images were personal to him, and these are personal to somebody else. He asked about why this other person had taken them, but he was in shock over the images. The emotion that he got from it, which is basically how horrible that these people aren’t paying any attention to it. They’re like the building, they’re not paying attention, just like that building.

AS: Exactly! That’s what I sensed too. But then I was surprised because I also sensed this from him. Like putting this in architecture, in a way he’s treating the event like they’re treating it too...

M: Right, he’s seeing it from their eyes. That’s the point of the whole thing. They’re like the building; they’re not doing anything, just like that building. And what he wants to get is the horror of that. That horror in that building.

AS: Does he mind that I’m asking him this?

M: He’s not hurting over it; it hurt him, but he’s not hurting now. He’s actually... What I get from him: he’s very playful, happy...

AS: But he was hurt...

M: Yes, he was hurt...

AS: From what at the beginning?

M: Hurt is the wrong word, but shocked is more the word, by people in general, their apathy, their not caring, their self-involvement, their narcissism. People can be socially aware, but if they’re not doing something about it, then they’re still apathetic, they’re still narcissistic, they’re still caring about themselves and are still not doing what needs to be done.

AS: I’m just trying to reflect on what you... He told you about how to see these images in a broader way?

M: Like a story... as opposed to individually.

AS: But like a story, it means these images connected to the many other images?

M: They’re all connected in a story. When these photos are going to be shown he’ll put them where they need to go. Do you know what I mean?

AS: No!

M: You will know. You’re thinking on it, and he’s happy that you’re thinking on it, but you’re thinking too hard on it and he’ll put it where it needs to go. Does that make sense?

AS: I’m thinking too hard...?

M: Over-thinking, over-thinking.

AS: I’m over-thinking.

M: You’re over-thinking and he’ll make it plain to you, he’ll make it plain to you, when they need to be viewed.

AS: About the cards, was there something that...

M: Yes, because he keeps doing the same card, the nine of cups and what he also wants to say is that even after we talk, this should be reflected upon, that the answer also is a progression, and that it should be reflected upon, and that it will reveal itself as well [my notebook falls from the table]. Also pay attention to your notes too, because obviously he wants to take them too. What I’ve noticed with him is that he’s trying to help you, because when he did this with the cards, one of the cards came up, the nine of cups. Mystery being revealed is what the traditional meaning of that card is. That’s why he wants you to stop over-thinking it. It’s almost contradictory, because it’s important for you too, to over-think it, but when you get the answers as a person, as an individual, he wants you to over-think it, as an artist he wants you to just get it. The common man has to see it in a certain way. The artist sees it in a different way. So there’s an objective way of looking at it clinically and there’s the artist way of looking at it. He wants it to be viewed as both, both clinical and emotional.

AS: Can he see these images now?

M: What do you mean? He can see everything!

AS: Could he have not come?

M: Yes, yes. Not all the time you do get something. Sometimes he might have said, “Come back next week.” And that’s why he keeps saying this too – that as much as he’s here now with us, in the next week, in the next five days you’ll have an insight yourself. Now it’s for you to know whether it’s in your dreams or whether it’s while you’re doing your art. But he’s saying to pay attention. Now, I have a feeling that it will come in your dreams and not your art, because you’ll think too much about your art, but you won’t about your dreams.

AS: And the place from where we’re calling him today, does it make any difference for him that we’re in Los Angeles rather than somewhere else?

M: No, it’s supposed to be seen from a more global aspect. He doesn’t see it that way though; he doesn’t really see it from the location... He could come anyway.

AS: When he worked on the archive and put the images in different categories, when he took decisions where to put the images, was there also irony, which led his choices?

M: That’s the whole point! It’s that dark humor aspect of it that he wanted to get from that. But he wanted the question and he wants it to kind of go like this [moving her arm like a snake]. He wants the thinking, but he also wants the horror of the thinking and the fact that people aren’t paying attention. There’s something about why he had the grass in the second picture. The grass is about redemption, the possibility of that not having to be so. Do you know what I mean? The softness of the grass, the softness of the trees, which aren’t as apparent in the first photo. The grass is part of the architecture too, that’s what he’s saying.

AS: This is the first time that I’ve been in a séance and I wondered if he would come not only because of whether he wanted to come or not but also because of whether he believes in this sort of meeting, given that during his life I have the impression that he was very much attached to the real world.

M: This is the real world. The main thing about doing any sort of reading is being open to it and he doesn’t need to worry about that now. He doesn’t need to worry about being...

AS: No, I was more worried about whether we reached a communication in the beginning, if he minded that I asked for this sort of communication.

M: No, no he wanted that.

AS: In his lifetime I’m not sure he believed in that.

M: Right, but that’s the operative word, ‘in his lifetime’.

AS: What did you say?

M: That’s the operative word, ‘in his lifetime’.

AS: I don’t want to interrupt you, so you tell me...

M: That’s... [laughs] You can ask another question if you want to ask another question. A lot of times, what happens when I channel is “bibiribiribirip” and then it goes and I’m silent because I’m not getting anything anymore, so... If you have another question he’ll answer I guess, but if you don’t he won’t. Just like that.

AS: Thank you.

M: Oh thank you.

Ulysses, 2007

“Instance he’s playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like, till you hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right: then hear chords a bit off: feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks, over barrels, through wirefences, obstacle race. Time makes the tune. Question of mood you’re in. Still always nice to hear.” — James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

Ulysses (2007) converts a yet unreleased pop song into a blueprint of rhythmical instructions and melody hints. Based on an original song by Franz Ferdinand – also called Ulysses – that was only released in autumn 2009, the work attempts to defy the sequential order between the original and the replica, giving visitors a chance to guess, speculate, perform and even record their own interpretation of a song before it is released. Working closely with the members of Franz Ferdinand, I devised a set of means and conditions that could hypothetically lead the visitor to imagine and perform a yet unknown song.

Ulysses consists of three parts: a score (co-written with Jeremy Millar) that merges the song’s lyrics with a series of refined instructions (detailing exactly when and how the drums and cymbals might be struck); a playlist of melodic fragments corresponding to the different song parts (the intro, verse, riffs, chorus, middle, and coda); and a set combining a drum kit and a drum screen.

The Score

Rather than using traditional musical notation, the drum score part combines a range of onomatopoeic indicators (of the sorts of sounds to be produced with the drum set) and more specific instructions for playing, with the original lyrics of the song. Given the title of the song – Ulysses – it seemed only appropriate that all of the onomatopoeic words and the phrases used as specific instructions were excerpted from James Joyce’s 1922 novel.

The Playlist

A playlist of distinct melodic fragments – sung or performed by the band members of Franz Ferdinand – that acts like an impetus helping visitors fathom the melodic contour of the song and create their own “replica” of it.

The Set

A basic pattern of drums and cymbals, surrounded by transparent acoustic panels on which the printed score parts are attached, and a CD-player, where the visitor/performer can listen to any of the tracks of the playlist.

Answer Me, 2008

Answer Me was shot in Teufelsberg, which means “Devil’s mountain” in German. It’s a very singular place, atop a hill made from the rubble of post-war Berlin, under which another building, a military-technical college designed by Albert Speer, is buried. During the Cold War, a listening station was built on top of the hill to monitor Soviet and East German communications.

The film is based on a dialogue from a note that Michelangelo Antonioni wrote on the breakup of a couple, wherein he wanted “to shoot not their conversation but their silences, silence as a negative dimension of speech.”

A woman tries to end a relationship: “It’s over, admit it. That way everything will be out in the open and we’ll know what to do.” Her companion refuses to listen and plays the drums fiercely. She says: “Answer me!” again and again. At times we hear it, at times we only see her lips phrasing it, her voice silenced by his drumming.

Due to the echo produced by the geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, drumsticks resting on a vacant drum next to her play to the echo of his drumming. The skin of the vacant drum vibrates and responds to the frequencies of his playing. Amplified by the dome, those frequencies cause the drumsticks to bounce, creating not only an audible but also a visible echo. Whilst he refuses to listen and plays the drums in order to prevent her voice from reaching him and discontinue her words, at the same time he is “crossing” the space, coming closer to her via those frequencies.

In Answer Me, I placed Antonioni’s exchange under the physical influence of architecture. In such a building, is such an exchange a monologue or is his drumming the other half of a dialogue of which we only “understand” the mono made of words?

It Will Happen Exactely Like That, 2008

“With a body fake he will dribble past Peter Reid. Tiptoeing he will approach the opposing half. A searching ball to the right for Jorge Valdano. Hodges will anticipate Valdano with a soft lob directed to his goalmouth. The great goalkeeper Peter Shilton will come out for an apparently good hold. But suddenly Diego Armando Maradona will arrive. With a hand he will soar past the outstretched arms of Shilton and will touch the ball scoring a goal. It will happen exactly like that. The tiny Maradona with his hand will mock the giant Shilton.”

Bruno Pizzul, the famous Italian soccer commentator, spells out the action that will lead to Maradona’s Hand of God goal as an event yet to come. For this recording, in Parco Sempione in Milan, I wrote the names of the players involved in the action on pieces of paper and scattered them on the grass in the form of a large circle. I invited Pizzul to imagine and presage the action while walking from one “player” to the other. He was not to engage the player coming next in the action before he passed by the paper with the player’s name on it. The action slows like a walk in the future.

Title Suspended, 2008

A surprising sense of vulnerability emanates when a metaphor comes alive. I wanted to unsettle the standstill of an emblematic image – the Touch of God[27] – tracing the arrival and the departure of this particular moment, from deconstruction to reconstruction, from despair to repair.

As the gloved hands rotate around their axis, gravitational force slowly shapes their form, granting Title Suspended a sense of becomingness leading to the perfect moment

Why the Lion Roars, 2008

One October evening, the Esplanade des Quinconces underwent an abrupt changeover of seasons. There was no wind and the surroundings seemed almost forgotten by the weather. Only the trees challenged the complete stillness, quivering in different places as if tickled from within. Under the thick autumnal foliage, scores of formicating swallows seemed to have lost track of time, lured by the unusual mildness and a generous bounty of leftovers from the café terraces beneath the trees.

A sudden bang of fireworks prompted a whirlwind of wings flapping and fluttering – an explosion of swallows took flight from the trees all at once. In their rush, the entire foliage quaked so thoroughly that in the space of four minutes, three months of autumn had been fast-forwarded. The brown leaves reached the ground first, while the yellow ones – like closing credits – drifted for longer in the air, soliloquising the first consonant of winter.

Why the Lion Roars is a composition of feature films that communicate through a feeling for temperature. Each of the fifty-seven selected films represents specifically defined degrees, from -11°C to 45°C. A thermometer measures the temperature outside the projection space and simultaneously edits the film program, which changes in correspondence with the actual outdoor temperature. The commotions of weather dictate the films’ narratives. At the exact moment of an increase or decrease in temperature, each film is interrupted and replaced by another, provoking an unplanned collision of meaning – the films hibernate until their “season” comes.

Why the Lion Roars plays Chinese whispers with film. Some are seen as fragments as the temperature fluctuates wildly in the morning while other films are projected in the whole or even loop as the temperature stabilizes later in the day. Endlessly edited by the fluctuation of weather, Why the Lion Roars trusts to climatic chance its unique convergence of fiction. A found future perpetually unsettles the present at its own discretion.

Why the Lion Roars is the temperature-cut version of a fiction based on a true story: the weather.

A Solo in the Doldrums, 2009

A custom-made snare drum conceals an in-built speaker playing inaudible low-frequency sounds that incite vibrations on the skin of the drum and the rat-a-tat of drumsticks. Responding to an invitation from the choreographer Siobhan Davies, I asked her to conceive an act to be performed without an audience. A microphone closely recorded her movements in the space, however, and these sounds were then modulated into inaudible frequencies.

Like a footnote without a note, the drumsticks enact the vestiges of an unseen dance.

5 Flutterbyes, 2010

5 Flutterbyes[28] is based on the aria Vogliatemi bene, un bene piccolino from the first act of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The part of Madama Butterfly has been revised so that not one but five sopranos personify the character of the heroine. They are spread in distant locations across the stage and the floor of the theater. The whole house is plunged into darkness, only lit by custom-made fans equipped with LED lights carried by the singers.

The five sopranos never sing at once: when one soprano sings, the other ones only mime the act of singing. The very instant the singing soprano withholds her voice to continue lip-synching, the voice of another soprano takes over. Consecutive phrases, words, or sometimes only syllables are assigned to each soprano, so that a “single” voice of Madama Butterfly is perceived fluttering around.

Her character floats, disembodied and yet alive in the wandering voice. Her song runs from one body to another, like water. The choreographed itinerary of the collaged voice produces a knotted presence that may be transient and split but feels continuous and whole.

Inversion – Creating Space Where There Appears to Be None, 2010

Creating space where there appears to be none between the foreground and the background of a drawing, an in-between dimension: through the rabbit hole we freefall to unfold the compressed space underlying a doodle over the papers of a politician.[29] Over the past ten years, his automated abstractions have connected the present to the otherwise unintelligible future, ‘between the semi-blindness innate to a political decision, and the preciseness in blindness, intrinsic to the artistic one’[30].

In order to perceive this space, we can put ourselves in an inane position, by looking at the foreground through the background, reversing our perception of the drawing. In its dynamic equilibrium, there is a slight imbalance, a tipping only legible to the mind, the aesthetics of which at first glance make such a leaning unnoticeable. The aim is not to swap the background for the foreground permanently, but to approach the invisible middle ground from both sides, in order to become aware of the ambivalence in-between.

This reversed perception of the drawing is possibly better explained by taking a painting of Nicolas Poussin as an example. In the foreground of Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake, we have the action: a man killed by a snake, who is chanced upon by a frightened figure, who is witnessed in turn by a maid, who has dropped her laundry. In the background, we have the gradual semblance of stability: fisherman reining in their nets, bathers by the lakeside, and a citadel in the far distance. In the newly reversed painting, from the perspective of the perennial citadel, the dramatic instant of the man killed by a snake has been cloaked by the deceptive security of the new foreground. The flip-flopping of the illusory strata of the painting has made us lose touch with its main commotion. The point of view from the citadel ‘does not take the details, does not reach the sounds, does not listen to the scream of the man bitten by the snake’[31].

Call the imagined inversion of the painting to a halt now, and let the fate of the man bitten by the snake return to the foreground. Translate this inversion into the doodle drawings of Edi Rama. The political issues in the background move forward while doodle retreats into the background. The viewer no longer omits the once-political background. There is a concealed urgency in the background of the automatic drawings indicating a ripeness of the underlying issues: a pragmatic offspring of democracy has emerged, namely the hollow call for stability, which has postponed core issues at hand. Democracy has been hi-jacked under the guise of “well- intended” bureaucracy. The vote is suspected of being fraudulent, but the means to correct it are equally fraudulent. Tied up in a vicious circle, the content of democracy is at the mercy of its syntax. This is why the background, veiled by the doodle, but also camouflaged on another level by the call for stability, sends out a now-signal, even more so than before. The only way that we can make this now-signal visible is by reversing the drawing.

After this exchange of the background with the foreground we are almost at the place of the author of the drawings, who is ‘walking without watching the street, sensing it, smelling the direction and being pushed in a direction, not necessarily by a rational assumption that there is a street, but by an instinct, that there is a street’[32].

When he doodles, his gaze is absentminded, perhaps a few steps behind his thoughts. His doodle’s background overlaps with his mind’s foreground. In fact, doodling is the opposite of absent-mindedness – it is the embodiment of present- mindedness, one could say, though the word doesn’t exist. The muted space between his mind’s foreground and the focus of his gaze is conveyed by a series of one-to-one conversations. From the differing perspectives of four different positions, each tete-a-tete relays – and traverses the distance between the foreground and the background of the drawings – like the intermediary figures in Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake by Poussin, who will in a matter of time bring to the citadel news of a man killed by a snake.

Le Clash, 2010

From the inside of a bricked-up building, a once influential rock and punk venue, comes the famous riff of a song.

Slowly revolving the handle of a barrel organ, two musicians stroll past the abandoned concert hall. The sounds of the organ and their singing synchronize with the resonating riff, prompting a simultaneous stereo effect.

A man wanders around the place with a shoebox under his arm. Listening absentmindedly, he slowly turns a small handle that sets off – note by note – a different version of the same song. When the distinct melodies conjoin, a sense of shifting reality occurs, highlighting two differing recollections of a punk song. They carry to the present the melody of the song; the hardcore of its punk and its low frequencies having dissipated on the floor of the deserted venue, where it was once performed.

1395 Days without Red, 2011

1395 Days without Red intertwines a daily rehearsal of the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra with a musician crossing the besieged city on her way to it. While a series of difficulties with the tempo interrupt the orchestra’s run-through of the First Movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, the woman’s progress through the city is halted by a succession of street-crossings that the siege has turned into probable dead-ends.

The film makes reference to the 1395 days of the siege of Sarajevo, when wearing red or bright colors risked attracting the attention of snipers.

At each crossing she stops, holds her breath and continues. After each she catches her breath and resumes. Breathing withheld, breathing released: portions of time that evolve into measures of humming that enable her to carry on. She runs through the music while crossing the city. She runs through the city while rehearsing the music in her head.

Like an improbable score, where two instruments respond to different stimuli while playing in tempo with each other, the humming and the orchestra synthesize into one tune, a tune of continuance and persistence against the odds.

Ravel Ravel, 2013

Two different interpretations of Ravel’s Left Hand Concerto for Piano and Orchestra are heard alongside one another. The respective tempos of each performance have been recomposed so that both executions continuously shift in and out of unison – one evolving slightly more slowly than the other, first creating a slight echo, then a doubling with the notes heard twice, eventually catching up, only to shift away from one another again.

My intention is to bring out the resonance of a space consecutive to the temporal lag between the two performances and, through the repetition of the same notes, to induce the impression of an echo in an entirely muted space where the absorption of the sound reflections annihilates all sense of space.

In an environment constructed according to the principles of an anechoic chamber, also referred to as a “non-place,” this paradoxically means creating an “other” space, a space “in-between” that emerges within the distinction between the two performances and resides in the interval between their respective tempos.

Unravel, 2013

Unravel travels along the path of Ravel Ravel but proceeds in the reverse direction.

While inquiring into the very same issues of time, tempo and space perception, Unravel disentangles the interlocked tempo differences of Ravel Ravel. Chloe, a DJ standing in the middle of the main space of the Venice Biennale’s German pavilion, endeavors to synch together the aforementioned executions of the Left Hand Concerto. Both of the recorded performances is played back by a separate vinyl record on a separate turntable. While with her left hand Chloe accelerates the record of one performance of the concerto, in anticipation of an imminent tempo decrease in its interpretation, her right hand fittingly slows down the record of the other performance of the same concerto, thus attempting to cancel the disparities in tempo between the two performances. In those moments when she succeeds in syncing both interpretations together, a curious stereo effect is heard: a stereo made of two distinct realities. The unrelenting concentration perceived in her face and the soft but surgeon-like choreography of her hands are in stark conflict with the music resulting from her actions. The growing rift between what one sees and what one expects to hear when watching a DJ play is disputed by a strong awareness of synchronicity. What we hear is nonetheless the fruit of what we see.

Ostensibly canceling the tempo differences in the two performances of Ravel Ravel revokes the previous perception of echo due to the repetition of the notes. Yet another echo is heard in the film: the natural reverb of the German pavilion instills in Unravel its own acoustic seal, impregnating the concerto with a new awareness of space.

The Present Moment, 2014

It is believed that the longest present moments – those pieces of time in which memory is not yet activated and notions of past and future do not arise – occur while listening to music. The extents of these present moments often correspond to the lengths of what are known as “musical phrases” or “gestures.”

The Present Moment is a fictional rearrangement of a piece of chamber music, as if it were set and experienced in a space ending in an imaginary cul-de-sac. A recording of Schoenberg’s renowned composition, Verklarte Nacht (Op.4), 1899, performed by a sextet of two violins, two violas, and two cellos, marks its starting point.

On entering the hallway where Verklarte Nacht is playing, solitary notes from the appearance of each new tone in Schoenberg’s score and brief musical gestures are released and drift across the space, as if expelled from the main body of the music. As these reach the far end of the hall, they accumulate and play repetitively, seemingly trapped in a dead-end, a space where acoustic memory is condensed.

Some notes – all belonging to either the B-flat or the D tone – extend their journey farther to conclude in two distinct films, where they are transformed into a series of recurring movements of shoulders, elbows, arms, and hands; the physical manifestation (and origins) of musical gestures. Their arrival and build-up is embodied by a group of six musicians placed together in a semicircle against a wall. Each musician plays their respective B-flat (or D), until the advent of the next B-flat (or D) tone in Schoenberg’s original score replaces it.

Throughout each film, the present moments exist both beforehand and at once with each of the musicians. Each member of the sextet serves and supplies the foregoing moment until relieved by the forthcoming. Their musical instruments remain nearly invisible, to stress the physical effort that precedes the sounding of the ensuing notes.

The Present Moment is a chamber-sized composition, whose trajectory in a large hall prompts sounds and induces actions that echo events and procedures that Schoenberg’s piece presaged, such as Serialism in music and high-grade division of labor and specialization in industrial production, developments that were to proliferate only later in history.

Lines (Jung, Huxley, Stravinsky), 2015

Lines (Afif, Sala, Flavien), 2015

Each time, I merge the palm lines of three different individuals, who are contemporaries of each other. For Lines (Jung, Huxley, Stravinsky) I chose the palm lines of Carl Gustav Jung, Igor Stravinsky and Aldous Huxley. While Stravinsky was a close friend of Huxley and dedicated his last orchestral composition to him, Huxley and Jung both analyzed the notion of the unconscious in two distinct ways.

In Lines (Afif, Sala, Flavien) I combined the palm lines of two artist friends – Saâdane Afif and Jean-Pascal Flavien – with my own.

For each drawing, I start from the same point on the surface of paper. I begin with the life line of a chosen hand to produce an uninterrupted sequence of life lines from the three different individuals. As soon as the succession of life lines closes on itself due to its natural curvature, I switch to the head lines. As soon as the composition is about to close on itself again, I continue with the heart lines, and so on. While the shape that each drawing acquires depends on the inherent shapes of the respective palm lines, my intention is to keep expanding the motif as far as the extent of the stone paper allows.

Bridges in the Doldrums, 2016

A three-part arrangement for clarinet, saxophone and trombone, Bridges in the Doldrums[33] has been constructed solely from the bridges of seventy-four pop, jazz and folk songs from different periods and geographies. They have been compiled in order of tempo, building a gradual sense of progressive acceleration with the three wind instruments trading roles aleatorically.

A bridge is a transitional period nearing the end of a song that has a significantly different melody or rhythm from the rest of it. It helps break away from the monotony of the set pattern of the song and inject some excitement into it, aiming at building the tension to the climax of the song or leading the song to its conclusion. The bridge alienates the listener from the song itself, keeping one’s attention while suspending one’s belief and expectations, until the chorus returns to reconfirm their acquaintance with it. After such reconfirmation the listener feels at home again, appreciating the estranging twist as long as a reunion ensues. The very nature of a bridge carries an “include me out” premise that might also lead to an “exclude me in” feeling.

Syncopation, 2016

(As told to Natalie Bell)

Syncopation involves a rhythm that disturbs our perception of time as a regular flow, producing the feeling that time may be coming out of joint.

In music, syncopation is intrinsically connected to the offbeat. Contrary to the beat, the offbeat is the stressing or the accentuation of the least expected moment within a time measure, producing momentum in what could be perceived as its weaker part. The offbeat and the beat are completely dependent on each other in that there is no sense of time without rhythm, and there is no rhythm that does not contain both. What interests me in syncopation – this interval or gap between the offbeat and the instant before the beat establishes itself – is how it pulls the beat, how it resists becoming the beat, how it offers an alternative space adjacent to it, whether in a rhythmic situation or, figuratively, a social or political one.

Syncopation is an essential rhythmical feature in reggae and jazz, intimately connected with African-American music traditions and, historically, with slave songs. In African music, the syncopated attack pulses are supplied by various drums and other percussive instruments, but during slavery in the US drums were forbidden. Slave owners feared they might be used to transmit messages between individual slaves or slave communities, so syncopated rhythms were instead produced by clapping and tapping.

Syncopation is also closely tied to our sensory intuitions. I think the body feels closer to the offbeat, whereas the brain feels close to the beat – to the more expected and evident. If we imagine the beat as a wave coming towards the shore – an event that you can see ahead of its arrival – the offbeat, by contrast, is the undertow that compensates for it, the invisible wave that pulls you offshore.

For me, syncopation extends beyond a music bar: it’s about having a moment of suspension, which might even be as long as a bridge. A bridge is a section in a song that has a significantly different melody or rhythm from the rest of it. It alienates the listener from the song itself, from the very self of the song, keeping one’s attention while suspending one’s belief. A bridge halts a song in the sense that it aims to go against both what preceded it and what is about to follow. In the bridge, suddenly you feel rupture – your sense of the flow of music and time has been interrupted. The bridge, like the offbeat, suspends the momentum of the song, yielding alienation instead of confirmation and familiarity.

Every song we love makes us feel complete, in the sense that within the song we feel at home. While it lasts, it surrounds us, it gives us everything. I like the idea of the bridge as something that pierces the bubble and lets you catch a glimpse of the outside. It’s like a piece of subjectivity that breaks with the established subjectivity of the song.

These parameters inspire me: this idea of questioning the given flow, or resisting what has already been established. Bridges, like syncopation, go against the expected. They carry that energy that I would call almost political. Bridges, after all, are also moments of drifting within a song, and in this sense parallel the derive of the Situationists – for example, the way one might ramble or wander throughout the city, using the city not as it was planned for movement but against the proscribed flow, creating situations that can liberate us from everyday thought or experience.

This is why I imagine syncopation as something that can evolve in space as much as in time. I like the idea that it may carry its momentum beyond the notion of musical time and bring attention to the least expected places or least regarded spaces: real places and social spaces that question conventional values and resist established norms. Syncopation can help subvert the sense of order and routine in our lives. Whereas the strong beat is guided by strict repetition, the offbeat produces difference and distinction. If the first signifies order, the latter allows for diversity and openness. While the established order wants to exclude anything that may question and rupture its proficiency, syncopation can embolden the weaker, give relevance to the marginal, and expand the scope and purpose of society.

I see syncopation, for instance, even in the application of color, the political action that is central to Dammi i Colori (2003), my video of an urban painting project led by artist and politician Edi Rama, then-mayor of Tirana, Albania. While it is tempting to read Rama’s chromatic renovation of a poor neighborhood as an instance of avant-garde utopianism, the colors were not meant to revive any idealistic promise but to reinitiate the desire for public space and the hope that things could change.

If it were a utopian project – there’s something authoritarian about utopian ideology – the colors would have been painted to correspond with the volumes of architecture. Rama’s colors, importantly, did not aim for this kind of visual uniformity, but instead overlapped irregularly with the volumes – most of them illegal architectural interventions meant to expand living space – in a sort of out-of-sync way, creating a visual noise. So the work generates a visual syncopation out of volumes and colors, and politically it is an offbeat intervention. After the fall of Communism (and a lousy post-Communist transition) in Eastern Europe, people felt nausea in regard to utopia. So Rama knew his project had to be different – it had to instigate hope without ideology.

In Dammi i Colori, if utopia is the beat, hope is the off-beat. Of course, I’m stretching my interpretation here, since I’m no longer speaking of common musical terms but of how the meaning of offbeat, bridges and syncopation extends in my experience and my imagination.

43 Names in the Doldrums, 2017

A snare drum is suspended upside-down, floating in midair, concealing a set of inbuilt speakers, whose frequencies set its membrane and drumsticks in motion. The ensuing rata-tat of the drumsticks suppresses the very source that prompts their response: a voice enumerating the names of the forty-three Ayotzinapa students[34] who went missing in 2014, in Iguala, Mexico. By triggering the drumsticks’ reaction, the voice inadvertently obstructs itself and consequently prevents the names from being heard.

43 Names in the Doldrums is at once a revelation and its instantaneous removal. It compels, or rather coerces, the names of the disappeared students to acoustically suppress themselves and commit an act of self-censorship. In doing this, it discloses an explosive condition in a permanent stagnation.

All of a Tremble (Encounter I), 2017

From the outset, wallpaper design has been closely linked to the expression of taste in households across the Western world, providing domestic life with ornate backgrounds, and imparting a sense of atmosphere, style, choice and character.

All of a Tremble (Encounter I) is a large-scale drawing that plays the encounter between two vintage wallpaper patterns. It is at once the visual manifestation of their merger and the subsequent soundtrack of their union.

In order to translate the encounter between the two designs into a soundtrack and transform their patterns into music, two halves from the respective original cylinders[35] are joined together into one roller. Consequently, the roller is converted into a sort of music box, in combination with a purpose-built steel comb. The reeds of the comb have been individually tuned according to a combination of Western and Eastern musical scales.[36]

Through the continuous rotation of the roller around its own axis,[37] its needles strike against the reeds to produce musical notes and phrases, thus bringing forward the sound of the backgrounds.

The designs are manually imprinted on strips of wallpaper by rubbing a pencil’s lead on the back of paper held against the cylinder. Slight differences occur within the repetitions of the patterns, due to variations of the manual gesticulation of the pencil. By virtue of these inconsistencies evoked by replicating the roller’s design by hand, the ensuing result resembles a large drawing rather than an automated print. Such inconsistencies intentionally contradict the wallpaper’s testament[38] to the emerging automation technology from the industrial age and onwards. In addition, the resulting variations exemplify the imaginative fluctuation of the notes played by the wallpaper roller.

The title of All of a Tremble (Encounter I) derives from the English expression “all of a tremble,” suggesting a sudden tremor that carries with it an element of surprise. There is further context for using this phrase here, as “all of a tremble” were the first words ever spoken artificially by a synthetic voice.[39]

Them Apples, 2017

An anthem is also a central motif of Them Apples – forty-four drawings of individual apples from which a bite has been taken – arranged on the wall as notes on an imaginary score of the German national anthem. The individual images are created through drawing into consecutive layers of wet ink applied onto stone paper, which is characterized by its lack of absorbency – the liquid slowly dries on the surface of the paper. (The process recalls Anri Sala’s early training in fresco painting.)

The bites, like fingerprints, are unique and belong to refugees the artist invited to participate. An integral part of the project that constitutes the conceptual and material basis for Sala’s drawings, was a three-day workshop, organized in cooperation with the public arts organization Kurt-Kurt in Berlin-Moabit. The interaction with the refugees during these sessions in which the artist’s studio and refugees produced objects, drawings, and photographs, created the conditions from which the drawing project departs – performative, time-based events that became drawings incorporating this origin.

Them Apples creates a densely woven web of signification, between the individual and the nation, new beginnings and great uncertainty, identity and integration, represented both by the ambivalence of the apple as symbol of knowledge, temptation and redemption and the German anthem, a hymn laden with overdetermined traces of historical significance.

Take Over, 2017

An encounter with a familiar tune usually produces a curious pleasure that rises from our anticipation of what will follow. Take Over eludes gratification, as it willfully entangles two globally celebrated songs – La Marseillaise and The Internationale.

Written and composed in 1792, La Marseillaise was originally tied to the French Revolution, before it spread to other countries where it became a symbol for the overthrow of oppressive regimes. The 1871 lyrics of The Internationale – a hymn to the ideals of fairness, equality and solidarity – were initially set to the tune of La Marseillaise, until its original music was composed in 1888. This musical kinship reveals their one-time symbolic affinity. From the onset, both anthems have undergone major changes in their political connotations: from revolution, restoration, socialism, resistance and patriotism, to additional associations with colonization and oppression in the second half of the twentieth century (as the national anthems of France and the Soviet Union respectively). Yet to this day their meaning remains in flux, as the two songs continue to be appropriated.

A lively performance between a pianist and a self-playing piano pits the two anthems against each other, transforming the keyboard into an animated landscape of valleys and peaks. The conjunction of the two melodies produces an estrangement that is not caused by the intrusion of the known by the unknown, but the subversion of the known by an equally well-known tune.

From appearance to process, from form to formation, from being to becoming, 2017

(As told to Falma Fshazi)

I see contemporary art as an approach rather than a practice, because it has a certain knack for venturing into the territories of other practices. Like a jack-of-all-trades who touches on everything without necessarily claiming or owning it, it cuts across diverse notions and media, scrutinizing their mutual intersections and taking a special interest in the gaps in between. By doing so, it reveals previously unnoticed perspectives in the junctions, and locates meaning within those gaps.

By nature, contemporary art is not inclined to divide the public into spectators, viewers, listeners, audiences or bystanders, nor partition off the public arena into specialized venues. It carries a potential to merge and blend, yet without lessening its singularity. Because of this particularly chameleonic nature, it inspires one to envision public space, and consequently architecture and urbanism, through the lenses of other arts and practices, methods and studies.

If I were to imagine public space as a movie, it would be one without script or cast. Its stagecraft would be exclusively intended to prompt the audience’s actions to take charge of the narrative. The camera movements would direct everyone’s gaze back to themselves. Transposed onto a music sheet, such space would sound like chamber music, where – in the absence of any conductor – a conversation between distinct voices takes place. The musical instruments lend an ear to each other and give heed to the flow, conveying without commanding, implying their intentions without imposing them.

If such public space were to become an archeological site some day, one would hope to extract from it the ruminating silences and the ensuing actions that portended the future. As my imagination follows its course, the focus starts shifting from appearance to process, from form to formation, from being to becoming. Progressively, the space becomes more permeable and transient. It is captivating but not overbearing, suggestive but not imposing, conscious of its past, yet conveying only nostalgia for the future.

A gripping fable of endless narratives that require no definite action, such space would combine the desire to congregate with the opportunity to drift away, the appetite for permanence with the craving for an ever-shifting present moment.

The Last Resort, 2017

I wanted to imagine how a fictional journey through the winds, the waves, and the water currents of the high seas would affect a musical masterpiece of the age of Enlightenment; what would become of Mozart’s Clarinet concerto if it were to float and drift like a message in a bottle, until washed ashore after a long voyage?

Mozart wrote the score in 1791, three years after the landing of the first English fleet at Botany Bay in 1788 that preluded the colonization of Australia. In counterpart, I had at the back of my mind the rift and the ensuing contradiction between the departure point of some remarkable principles of the Enlightenment – such as tolerance and a nonjudgmental acceptance of the other – and their fallouts on arrival, exacerbating prejudices, which in turn caused untold devastation and loss. I was intrigued by this sense of chasm and chose to imagine it as a corruption delivered by the journey. Consequently, I wanted to implant this notion of corruption in Mozart’s concerto itself. I fantasized it as a force majeure – in this case the weather and the unforeseeable circumstances of the journey –

preventing the composition from fulfilling the composer’s aims.

Having this in mind, I substituted Mozart’s original tempo indications with the wind conditions described in the private journal of James Bell, A Voyage to Australia, where every day’s entry starts with a description of its weather. (Back then, the journey to Australia followed the clipper route, and its accomplishment largely depended on the sea winds and ocean currents.) Accordingly, unfavorable or calm winds, breezes, gales, hurricanes and storms literally take over the concerto, transposing Bell’s daily recounting of his journey into the composition’s bars and musical phrases.

My intention was to subvert Mozart’s Clarinet concerto, its flow as a whole, its gravity and its pace, in order to produce the perception of a concert that has travelled a long distance, endured the high seas of journey, making it to another shore, although not necessarily in the original form intended by its creator.

Thus my aim was to compose with corruption – a time-based phenomenon – while underscoring its disrupting power.

If and Only If, 2018

In If and Only If [40] a garden snail travels the full length of a viola bow, gradually moving across it, yet disrupting the delicate balance on which the maestro’s playing relies. The snail’s pace imposes itself on the performance, prompting the viola player to make adjustments for, and compose with, this evolving situation. When the snail slows down, hesitating to move forward, the violist encourages it to carry on. Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola is thus subverted through the tactile interaction between the musician and the snail, its duration revised to almost double its usual time. The Elegy elongates into a journey that becomes a tangible part of its musical rearrangement.

Slip of the Line, 2018

Could an act of magic transcend the workflow of an assembly line, redeeming the goods from their prescribed form and function? Introducing a magician into the heart of a production process grants the assembly line the traits of an enchanted, otherworldly realm. Rationality, physical laws and economic efficiency recede to allow the production line a degree of lyrical unknown, like a sentence

that can no longer deliver its intended meaning, having stumbled on a Freudian slip of the tongue.

AS YOU GO, 2019

Ravel Ravel, Take Over and If and Only If, the three works that constitute AS YOU GO, were all premised on journeys of tempo and redefinition, as well as music folding onto itself. AS YOU GO combines them into an extended cyclical passage that one can walk around, beside, and within. As developing narratives traverse the entire exhibition space, visitors are invited to eitherstroll along with their waves of imagery through consecutive rooms, or experience their itinerant projections from set positions.

What the three individual works also have in common is that they’re comprised of pairs of complementary films. And, as these pairs pursue and cajole each other across the entire space, they create their own new pace of presences and gaps, made of images and blanks, sounds and silences. Because they roam the exhibition while being present in multiple rooms at once, contrasting feelings of deja vu and ubiquity arise, as repetition wrestles with progression.

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[1] In his essay “Manutensions, or Anri Sala’s Outstretched Hands,” Peter Szendy plays with the words maintenir (to hold) and maintenant (now), writing that Sala “likes for us to feel the tension that maintains it now [maintenant]”: in Anri Sala. Ravel Ravel Unravel, published on the occasion of the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, exhibition catalog, edited by C. Macel and A. Sala (Giardini della Biennale, French Pavillion, Venice), Paris: Manuella Éditions, Institut français, Centre national des arts plastiques, 2013, p. 105. He writes about Ravel Ravel (2013), based on a score written in 1929–30 by Maurice Ravel for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I. In this work, two films are projected onto two screens, each showing a performer’s left hand playing the French composer’s concerto in a virtuosic reparation of the hand through the representation of two left hands: “What interests Anri Sala is visibly the manual work, the manipulation necessary to make, to manufacture a musical phrase worthy of the name […] a presence that is constantly manufactured from [the hands’] radical disjuncture”: ibid., pp. 109–10.

[2] Richerd Sennett’s The Craftsman, published in 2008, posits the importance of manual labor and craft as a form of thinking with matter, and material consciousness, without fear of speaking about a form of quality-driven work, which recalls the chiseling away that all editing and finalizing of an installation by Sala entails. While celebrating and continuing the political philosophical practice of Hannah Arendt, of whom he was a student, Sennet also distances himself from her hierarchy between the maker of things, the engineer, and the political guidance needed. She had expressed her ideas in The Human Condition in 1958, shortly after the fi rst nuclear bombs. Her hierarchy manual labor — animal laborans —the human who takes the work as an end in itself, the engineer or creator of technology who does not refl ect on its implications — is positioned below homo faber, the human who refl ects on the “Why?” of making things and who thus exercises politics (the philosophical enquiry through human speech and conscious action), which constitute the public realm, which makes life fully lived. In this public realm, people should decide which technologies to pursue and which to repress. Arendt contrasts homo faber — the human as conscious maker—to the animal laborans who is absorbed in a task. According to Arendt, says Sennett, “people who make things usually don’t understand what they are doing. Arendt’s fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora.” In the “public realm, through debate, people ought to decide which technologies should be encouraged and which should be repressed.” Furthermore, for Arendt, decisions should stay provisional and change over time: “The rules issuing from deliberation are cast in doubt as conditions change and people ponder further; new, provisional rules then come into being. Arendt’s contribution to this tradition turns in part on the insight that the political process exactly parallels the human condition of giving birth and then letting go of the children we have made and raised. Arendt speaks of natality in describing the process of birth, formation, and separation in politics. The fundamental fact of life is that nothing lasts — yet in politics we need something to orient us, to lift us above the confusions of the moment. The pages of The Human Condition explore how language might guide us, as it were, to swim against the turbulent waters of time”: R. Sennett, The Crafstman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 2–6.

[3] Anri Sala in conversation with the author, January 2019.

[4] Ibid.

[5] É. Sadin, La silicolonisation du monde. L’irrésistible expansion du libéralisme numérique (Paris: Éditions L’Échappée, 2016).

[6] Anri Sala in conversation with the author, 15 January 2019.

[7] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945] (New York: Routledge, 2013).

[8] C. Malabou, Ontology of the Accident. An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. 5 (first ed. Ontologie de l’accident. Essai sur la plasticité destructrice, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2009).

[9] Ibid., p. 18.

[10] Ibid. pp. 19 e 44-45.

[11] See Marcella Beccaria's essay in this volume.

[12] G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002). First ed. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998).

[13] In La dialectique de la durée [1936] (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950), Gaston Bachelard develops these ideas from the notion of rhythmanalysis conceived by the Brazilian theoretician Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos in 1931. See Dialectic of Duration (Geneva: Clinamen Press, 2000).

[14] See here, p. 125.

[15] See here, p. 127.

[16] Hito Steyerl first referred to Bubble Vision in a brief lecture at the Serpentine Marathon GUEST, GHOST, HOST: MACHINE!, City Hall, London, October 7, 2017, which was repeated in a longer form at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design in Michigan on January 31,, 2018, then at Yale University on February 22, 2018, and elsewhere. According to Steyerl, Bubble Vision “refers to the markedly disembodied process of viewing the world through a parallel spherical multiverse. She highlighted aesthetics’ current ubiquity by replicating the immersive experience offered by VR, constructing a 360 degrees view of the hypothesis’ pervasiveness in our everyday lives.” See Emily Sasmor at (accessed November 21, 2019)

[17] See Hito Steyerl, (accessed November 21, 2019).

[18] Anri Sala in conversation with the author, May 2019.

[19] Anri Sala’s quotes in this essay are excerpted from conversations with the author, which started back in 2002 in view of a possible exhibition at Castello di Rivoli. Further references include the artist’s writings, gathered together and published for the first time in this catalog.

[20] Duomo di Milano.

[21] Encyclopedia of World Crime. Author, Publisher and Editor-in-chief: Jay Robert Nash,

[22] The Outer Banks of North Carolina (US).

[23] Lak-kat 2.0 (British/American), 2015

[24] Lak-kat 3.0 (Brazilian Portuguese/Portuguese/Angolan Portuguese), 2016

[25] Lak-kat 4.0 (Spanish: Spain/Venezuela/Mexico/Argentina), 2017

[26] Composition of the film:

• 1175 frames with a close-up still image of Agassi

• 3 frames with the still image and a round white hole on the top right side of the image

• 19 frames with the still image

• 3 frames with the still image and the round white hole

• 240 frames with the still image

[27] The detail from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, where Adam’s and God’s fingers almost touch.

[28] 5 Flutterbyes was part of Il Tempo del Postino, an onstage exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich

Obrist and Philippe Parreno and commissioned by the Manchester International Festival in 2007.

[29] The drawings referred to in this text are automatic drawings by Edi Rama, the Mayor of Tirana, leader of the centre-left opposition in Albania and artist. His doodles take on a repetitive form like that of a “reality planner” whose bird’s eye vision of a landscape demarcates neighborhoods as zones of thought through the cartography of color.

[30] A notion borrowed from Marcus Steinweg’s conversation with Edi Rama. The conversation was part of a series of tete-a-tete conversations that the art historian Michael Fried, the artist Philippe Parreno, the philosopher Marcus Steinweg and the political activist Erion Veliaj held with Rama in Berlin, June 2010, for the exhibition Creating space where there appears to be none – Conversion/Inversion.

[31] Edi Rama in conversation with Erion Veliaj.

[32] Edi Rama in conversation with Marcus Steinweg.

[33] Based on To Each His Own (in Bridges), 2015 an arrangement for clarinet, saxophone and trombone, percussion and base amp by Anri Sala in collaboration André Vida.

[34] Their names in alphabetic order: Abel García Hernández, Abelardo Vázquez Peniten, Adán Abrajan de la Cruz, Alexander Mora Venancio, Antonio Santana Maestro, Benjamín Ascencio Bautista, Bernardo Flores Alcaraz, Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal, Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Munoz, César Manuel González Hernández, Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, Christian Tomás Colón Garnica, Cutberto Ortiz Ramos, Dorian González Parral, Emiliano Alen García de la Cruz, Everardo Rodríguez Bello, Felipe Arnulfo Rosa, Giovanni Galindes Guerrero, Israel Caballero Sánchez, Israel Jacinto Lugardo, Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, Jonás Trujillo González, Jorge Álvarez Nava, Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza, Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideno, Jorge Luis González Parral, José Ángel Campos Cantor, José Ángel Navarrete González, José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa, José Luis Luna Torres, Julio César López Patoltzin,

LM|‰Š¤¥Leonel Castro Abarca, Luis Ángel Abarca Carrillo, Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola, Magdaleno Rubén Lauro Villegas, Marcial Pablo Baranda, Marco Antonio Gómez Molina, Martín Getsemaní Sánchez García, Mauricio Ortega Valerio, Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez, Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías, Saúl Bruno García.

[35] The wallpaper printing process involved cylinders patterned with small metallic needles raised in relief above the roller.

[36] The Chromatic and Chromatic Quarter Tone Up can be considered as Western scales, whereas the Pelog scale, comprising three modes – Selisir, Tembung and Sunaren – is native to Bali and Java.

[37] Thanks to customized motion-control software, the speed of the rotation varies according to a definite composition.

[38] Originally wallpaper designs were hand-painted or applied by block printing. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the invention of the roller-printing process increased the speed and efficiency of wallpaper production.

[39] They were the successful outcome of experimentations by Eric Allan Humphriss, a young British physicist working as an acoustic engineer for the British Film Industry in the early 1930s. In order to replicate speech by means of a synthetic voice, Humphries set out to analyze the sound of the words that he wanted to reproduce until he could establish which wave pattern belonged to each word – starting from finding the graphic correspondence to each phonetic component, and combining them together in a sequence that corresponded with the required word. He was able to carefully draw shapes on long cardboard strips that could be optically read by a machine and transformed into a voice, uttering: “all of a tremble!”

[40] The term “if and only if” signifies in logic a bi-conditional statement, meaning that both conditions must hold for the statement to be true.

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