Restare (with Francesco Fonassi)

Installation

The site-specific sound installation by Francesco Fonassi and Fabio Perletta was born from a reflection on the space hosting it: the dormitory of the workers inside the old oil mill of Palazzo Casamarte, in the heart of Loreto Aprutino. 

The space, characterised by a visible architectural partition, differs from the rest of the building because of its strong domestic identity around which the two artists have together built a sound artwork based on the study of frequencies inherent to the place. The two tracks meld to become a sole body and to overcome the structural confines, imposing themselves on the space as an immaterial presence.

In the lower half, a group of everyday objects act as a frame for the sounds of Fabio Perletta who is interested in small, almost imperceptible frequencies, inspired by Japanese culture and Zen aesthetics which invites us to return to the essential elements of existence. His reflection is based on the recovery of a (biological) rhythm long since lost to the current generations; he uses symbolic objects to convey the message, such as an old grindstone associated to the shape of a Tsukubai washbasin (from tsukubau, “to bend” in English, as an act of humility), a basin placed at the entrance of sacred places in Japan, used also in the tea ceremony for the ritual washing of the hands and the rinsing of the mouth. For the occasion, the artist proposes ‘primitive’ sounds recalling a rhythm, a pulsation, something ancestral manifested repeatedly.

In the upper area, Francesco Fonassi steps in, in close contact with the surface upon which the workers would lay down to sleep after long hours of labour. With a sound source emerging from the dark background, the room becomes the emanation of peasant memory; the artist uses a fragment of Cujë la livë, a traditional song about olive harvesting, registered by the ethnomusicologist Carlo Di Silvestre in 1995 and performed by singers from the Gran Sasso. The sound samples, processed by Fonassi, superimposed and stratified, traverse a ‘hyper-vocal’ situation until reaching darker and more filtered crepuscular sonorities.

Fatigue, work, an inseparable bond with nature, frugality and the simple life that our grandfathers led belong to a remote past that today seems even further away, manifesting itself in the form of these distant echoes.

Text by NOW (New Operation Wave)