I work in the visual arts field.
On the occasion of FAI’s (Italian National Trust) spring days 2014, I was asked to create a soundscape for the Brescia’s Roman fount, set in the Mompiano’s area. Sounscape had to integrate with the archaelogical site, welcoming visitors and emphasize their feeling.
Then, I was asked to visually represent my sound on the catalog.
So, I started to study the sound wave’s progress and all the sound track, I used specific software and then
I represented sound waves in a matter way. From a technical view by software to ‘artistic’ rapresentation faithful to the previous,
no improvisation or mutations. Only medium is different!
From here my work is started: to make visible and tactile the sound tracks!
I started drawing my soundscape’s track on paper using natural textures such as bark, woody fibers and stones.
These elelemnts already gave me a rhythm and a graphic. Then I examined the Braile’s system and blinds’s arrangements.
Besides paper I also use bees wax and vinylic. These kinds of materials are contrasting each other:
- bees wax is natural and warm empathically,
- vinylic is artificial and cold empathically.
But both are malleable, sensible to light’s changes and create good sensation if you touch them.
I trust in the wax because a lot of artist such as ‘poveristi’ and then Anish Kapoor already have used this material to create some works of art. I poured, cut, scratched the material a bit like Alberto Burri did; obviously my aim is different: I want represent formally and
materially the sound composition’s rhythm and progress because these works are made to be touched as well as listened.
Every works is always followed by audio whence they originated.
INSTALLATIONS | EXHIBITIONS
Location| Cinema Nuovo Eden, Brescia.
Ogni fatto ha un suono.
È così indisciplinato estraniarsi dal campo visivo mentre si guarda. Ascoltare o immaginare.
Chiedersi:
“Quale suono ci sarà stato in quel fatto storico?”.
Prima il suono, dopo - talvolta molto dopo - la forma.
La notazione moderna è pura solitudine, quasi pittura.
Allora meritiamo sacrosanta indisciplina, come disse il poeta.
Quasi mai possiamo cogliere il senso di un vero scritto, sino a quando questo non viene letto.
Restituito, non solo intimamente, mettendoci la faccia. In altre parole mettendoci la voce. L’alta voce. A
voce alta. Infatti, ricordando la lezione di Walter J.Ong, sebbene le parole siano radicate nel discorso
orale, la scrittura le imprigiona, tirannicamente e per sempre, in un campo visivo.
Le parole e i gesti, fatti suono, rimbalzano nei pensieri, nella voce e nella memoria.
Quasi, dialoghiamo da soli.
Come scrisse Mallarmé:
“La Musica e le Lettere son il / volto ambiguo qui elargito verso / l’oscuro; scintillante là, con
certezza, / d’un fenomeno, il solo, che io chiamo l’Idea”.
Ecco quindi la questione dell’ascolto e di tutto il mistero che la avvolge e la connota. Molte volte ho
pensato che il suono fosse l’ultima frontiera delle arti figurative. La tabula rasa dell’arte dell’arte contemporanea.
Ma è solo un ‘depensiero’ estetico, e, comunque, qualcosa che non ho mai avuto l’opportunità di ricercare.
Ci sono alcuni concetti - come il tempo, ad esempio - molto difficili da definire perché si comprendono
solamente attraverso l’esperienza degli stessi. per questo problema che coinvolge una sorta di “estetica
dell’errore” e del “paradossale”, continuano a nascere, rigenerarsi e ripresentarsi i linguaggi.
Volendo sospendere (per ora) queste mie brevi riflessioni, dico che ascoltare è il solo modo per vedere.
Massimo Tantardini
Location| Lechi Museum, Montichiari.
One of contemporary art's aim is bring the viewer deep inside of the work of art through all the senses and not only by the sight. It is Maddalena Fanconi's purpose: bring the spectator to see, but also to listen and touch the art to completely understand it.
Work makes expressive sound through natural textures, engravings and reliefs on matter, so we can perceive music with every part of our senses: hearing, sight and touch.
Mara Vittoria Tagliati
Location| André Heller Botanical Garden, Gardone Riviera.
On the occasion of exhibition "MECCANICHE DELLA MERAVIGLIA 10" directed by Albano Morandi.
Sinestesie
Paolo Sacchini
With the works called “Touch the sound”, Maddalena Fanconi follows the remarkable synesthetic research that from the late nineteenth century of Richard Wagner comes to the most recent environmental and multi-sensory installations.
In the work carried out to the André Heller Botanical Garden, in fact, sight, hearing and touch are disposed each other concentrating a series of impressions and feelings that live in close connection each other.
Maddalena’s starting point is the soundtrack, composed mostly of “concreti” sounds (ie not by “musical notes” but by “noises” of daily life).
In this case, however, the soundscape proposed to the viewer, that dips itself in the work of art, is deliberately dissonant and in part also disturbing: next to an indistinct buzz alluding to the noise produced by bees (itself the bearer of a message - seen the disturbing phenomenon of decrease in bee population - and a subtle but disturbing imaginary of danger an pain), we capture especially the many noises electronically championships to evoke the atmosphere so-called “metallic”, alluding to a “mechanic” sound universe, whence stands out in particular a continuos roar reminiscent the chainsaw’s engine, which is the instrument by which man normally destroys the natural idyll that botanical garden intends to keep.
The sound component, however, is only a starting point, and not less important is the role of visuality. The installation has a rigorous and almost zen laying, with these long and delicate white sheets that descend from the greenhouse’s top to land, articulating the space in an immaterial and insubstantial way, then on the sheets’s surface the viewer reads a black track obtained by transcribing the sound by an electronic visualisation from specific software to a frottage made on the trees’s bark and leaves: preserved in the André Heller Botanical Garden: in this way, therefore, the natural elements are not limited to be theme of the installation, but become the tool of it.
Finally we discover the work’s title, the viewer can also tactilely perceive the sound: in fact, on the ground, continuing along the sheets falling from above, some beeswax tablets report the engraving of the audio track, that assumes a thickness concretely tangible and therefore the viewer is absolutely welcome to touch: touch the sound! Do you know?
CATALOG
Arte dell'interazione. Manufatti per trasmettere un messaggio da Augusto ad oggi. A cura di Maura Marella. 2014
PRESS
LA FABBRICA DELL'ARTE SULLE RIVE DEL GARDA
http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2015/giugno/06/fabbrica_dell_arte_sulle_rive_co_0_2015060
6_aa425e24-0c0c-11e5-8773-3eaa0cc1142a.shtml?refresh_ce-cp
CONTEMPORARY FOLLIES NEL GIARDINO BOTANICO
http://www.gardapost.it/2015/06/13/contemporary-follies-nel-giardino-botanico/
ARTE EXPO SUL GARDA
http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-36d866dd-c9f2-4ed8-aa43-675f2188e9f1.html
TOUCH THE SOUND AL GIARDINO HELLER
http://www.teletutto.it/videonews/touch_the_sound_al_giardino_heller/11678.html?uidy_58=TTappl.videonews.dettaglioVideoNews&record=25578
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© Maddalena Fanconi. All rights reserved.
For information contact:
maddalena.fanconi@gmail.com
