EQUAZIONE UNO

ALICE SCHIVARDI

10.05.2012 – 28.07.2012

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The Gallery Apart is proud to present Equazione Uno, a new creative project conceived by Alice Schivardi for her first solo exhibition in Rome.

Equazione Uno was born out of a series of meetings and of a trust and confidence building process, in order to persuade six people, different by age, gender and personal experiences, to open up doors that have been shut for long and to tell and offer the artist six real-life stories, recorded on a magnetic tape. Dramatic though anonymous stories, which are not meant to provoke the audience, but to raise its awareness on a multiple reaction shot. The artwork allows to listen to each single story or to live them all together as a composite aural and sensory experience, made of words overlapping with the accompanying sounds.

The sound installation that invades the gallery space is made of six loudspeakers connected to as many audio sources sent out from a computer. Each loudspeaker reproduces and spreads a story (each told by the relative telling voice) and a sound (different form the others). The visitor is transported into an anonymous environment, characterized by a diffused buzz, a mix of sounds and words that turns into a relaxing aural experience, a sort of concert of reassuring monotony.

As the six tales blend their sounds together, a relationship between word and sound is interweaved. However, as the visitor comes close to each loudspeaker, he/she will be also able to catch the single words and thus to listen to the stories and sounds. They are six different sinusoidal sounds, six pure sounds which stand out for producing pure sounding tones, giving life to an acoustic illusion which becomes echo even before voice of the self. Just as in physics sound wave propagation is expressed by equations, so Schivardi has coined the phrase Equazione Uno torefer tothe whole sound vibrations resulting from the merging of the telling voices with the pure sounds.

Schivardi has imagined the installation as an instrument of reification of a ‘miracle’, without any religious undercurrent and restored it to the dimension of an extraordinary, though not impossible, event. The complete trust and openness provided by these strange people and the attempt to turn the dramatic aspects of everyday life into a moving, but not pathetic personal experience, warmly private but also chillingly para-scientific, represent the features of a miracle that becomes real by transforming art into a social workshop, an instrument of human interaction.

To highlight the expressive power of the private dimension is the prospect that a strong communication, almost having the tones of a legend, can also start off from one of the most private practice. Schivardi has carried outa stunning work titled Ad immegine e somiglianza, a 12 m. long roll of acetate paper on which she collected and immortalized with drawings and embroideries the pictures that set on her mind during the interaction with the six individuals involved in the project, as well as the feelings stirred by their stories. A sort of Bayeux Tapestry that, however, does not depicts wars and conquests, but the delicate tumults of the soul.  Finally, an installation of six little ovals, a typical Schivardi’s work, each referred to one of the six story tales.

Sounds, written, spoken or staged texts, interlocution and interrelation with single individuals or with groups of individuals, acted or directed performances, drawing, embroidery, video and photography. These are the supports adopted by Alice Schivardi in order to create her artworks, always characterized by the awareness that stroking one’s own or someone else’s privacy can prove to be a sweet but even powerful expedient, to deeply investigate, understand, decode the reality, searching for signs, accounts and messages with a strong ethical, political and social impact.

The sound installation was realized thanks to the collaboration of Maestro Giacomo Del Colle Lauri Volpi.

Many thanks to the telling voices Marco Cucco, Giacomo Del Colle Lauri Volpi, Raffaele Pezzulli, Barbara Sacchelli and Nicoletta Salvi.

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