ICON-SONIC POSTCARDS N.1 - REGGIO EMILIA POSTCARD

Three parallel videos, 15 loudspeakers and lightboxes

vernissage: Chiesa di San Carlo, Festival Aperto, Reggio Emilia October 15, 2017

ICON-SONIC POSTCARDS N.1

Over 170 people of Reggio Emilia took part in the creation of 68 tableaux vivants - icon-sonic postcards - which will be present in 3 parallel projections and in dialogue with additional loudspeakers and light-boxes.

Each “postcard” is a result of a complimentary relation between an unpredicted environment and a directed and staged scene, a precise vocal indication and an intuitive interpretation, creating both a testimony of present reality as a psychologic subtext that, when combined with others, becomes a poetic fresco of a territory, of people, of places. 

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BACKGROUND

ICON-SONIC POSTCARDS N.1 was created between 2016 and 2017, starting parallel to the preparations of a new production of Avital's massive-sonic work REKA (in hebrew=background) in Reggio Emilia. Here you can view a short clip from the performance took place october 2016 in Teatro Valli: LINK.

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ARTISTIC STATEMENT

The voice is a singular individual phenomenon. Similar to the fingerprint, it is unique to each person, a result of physiognomy, culture and physiology. It is our first mode to communicate and relate to others, as a mode of expression, reaction and transmission. Any individual or group is capable to use the voice as an instrument of beauty through a non-linguistic use of notes and noises to create an expressive tool that, when joined to others, could create a substantial collective sonic richness and poetic impact.

When these vocal sound expressions are joined to the visual representation of the individual or the group as a tableaux vivants, a complex contextualisation may occur, giving us a flush of immediate iconic details (ambient, posture, dressing, age, staging) which - together with the vocal elements - can create complete multi-sensorial microcosmi, revelling both concrete and hidden possibilities within a given territory, and as such becoming both a testimony as a poetic transformation of itself. 

The choice of presenting the icon-sonic RE postcards as a triptych is connected also to my choice to stage these scenes - shot entirely in Reggio Emilia in different places (farm, theatre, dance school, night club, Teatro Valli etc)  in dialogue with classic iconography and painting, thus giving a clear visual point of reference (body position, light, staging).