Arthub presents
Flu水o
Thursday 25 November and Friday 26 November 2021, at 8 PM
in Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
A project by Alessandro Sciarroni with Andrea Anastasio and with Chiara Bersani, Rossella Biscotti with Attila Favarelli, Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo, Anna Raimondo, Silvia Gribaudi
curated by Davide Quadrio
based on an idea by Luciana Galliano
produced by Arthub, Shanghai/Hong Kong
Project partner
MAN_Museo d’Arte della Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro
Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai
n+n Corsino – SCENE44, Marseille
Ramdom, Gagliano del Capo (Lecce)
Cultural Partner
Fondazione Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
Gaswork & Triangle Network, London
Istituto Italiano di Cultura a Shanghai
Milano Musica e Casa degli Artisti, Milan
Polo Biblio-Museale di Lecce – Museo Castromediano
Supported by: Alcantara
The project has received support from the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020), a programme by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity at the Ministry of Culture for the international promotion of Italian art.
Arthub presents, in the spaces of Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Flu水o (Fluxo), a complex immersive, cross-disciplinary project, that won the Italian Council award (9th Edition, 2020). The project examines compelling themes in the relationship between distant epochs and cultures, and gives rise to unusual crossovers amongst different activities and media: contemporary opera music and performance, installations and dance, film and workshops.
The central theme of this visionary project is water, an element indispensable for life and a substance of immense poetic power that can also be a place of death and annihilation, the focal point for social, political and anthropological issues of urgent contemporaneity.
This duality of values is mirrored by the structure of Flu水o, which comprises the simultaneous presence of re-enactments and reinterpretations of some performances by 1960s East Asian artists with links to water alongside a production of Mare Nostrum, a sarcastic chamber opera by Mauricio Kagel.
The Flu水o project emerged from an idea by Luciana Galliano and it was curated by Davide Quadrio.
The opera was directed by Alessandro Sciarroni, who chose to share the project’s authorship with a number of personalities on the contemporary Italian and international scene, starting from a close cooperation with Andrea Anastasio to whom he entrusted the scenes, the musicians’ costumes and the site-specific installation for Mare Nostrum inspired by the waters of the Mediterranean, forming the stage set that will host Kagel’s opera and performances by the invited artists: Chiara Bersani – re-enactment of Water Music (1965) by Shiomi Chieko; Anna Raimondo – Le forme dei sogni tornano al mare (The shapes of dreams return to the sea), 2021, based on Water Music by Shiomi Cheiko; Rossella Biscotti with Attila Faravelli – re-enactment of Takemitsu Toru: Water Music for magnetic tape, Tokyo 1960; Silvia Gribaudi – re-enactment of Water Piece (1964) by Yoko Ono; Silvia Calderoni / Ilenia Caleo, re-enactment of Covered in Detergent on Stage, Bathing in Water (1964) by Nam June Paik.
Mare Nostrum, one of the highest expressions of Kagel’s musical theatre, will be performed by countertenor Kai Wessel and baritone Miljenko Turk with the Ensemble Bernasconi conducted by Arnaud Arbet, also featuring Elena Casoli, guitar, and Yuka Ohta, percussion. In addition, the opera will see the presence of performance artist Muna Mussie.
On Thursday 25 and Friday 26 November, within the spaces of Pirelli HangarBicocca, location of the colossal work The Seven Heavenly Palaces by Anselm Kiefer, Flu水o will be performed live and in its complete version: this represents a fundamental moment in the multi-faceted, complex international programme, a project that involves Europe and the Far East in the creation of an artists’ residency, a workshop, six performances, a chamber opera, an exhibition, three screenings and four talks.
The project was developed at n+n Corsino – SCENE44 in Marseille, where the production was initiated, at Casa degli Artisti in Milan, where from 14 to 21 October the working group performed detailed research on the opera’s themes during a residency, at Fondazione Pirelli HangarBicocca, and at the Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, where an exhibition will be installed. A video of the opera will be screened in the premises of three partner organisations – n+n Corsino SCENE44, Gasworks & Triangle Network, and Ramdom.
The final work will become part of the permanent collection at MAN, Nuoro, in the form of a video installation depicting film sequences of the performances, placed alongside scenic elements made during the residency in Marseille.
Flu水o also comprises the production of a video boxed set with images of all the performances, and authored texts offering detailed analyses.
The scenes, which will be presented in the performance on 25 and 26 November – true installations in themselves – and the singers’ and performers’ costumes were created by Andrea Anastasio. The stage set for Flu水o is an extension of his work Eden, created in collaboration with the Alcantara company. Eden is a giant anaconda, a metaphor for our contemporary society that swallows everything that it encounters. Eden represents a combination of an industrial product transformed by human use and abuse, and the post-organic beauty of a product such as Alcantara. The amphorae that will be used for Rossella Biscotti’s contribution are from the collection of the Castromediano Museum in Lecce, also in continuity with the museum’s operations; in fact, from when it reopened, it has planned its schedule according to a constant interchange between ancient and contemporary, even outside its own walls, expressing a close relationship featuring the reinterpretation of art contexts and forms.
Davide Quadrio, the curator, explains: “Eden, in Flu水o, takes the form of an underwater landscape, a desperate seabed made of human rubbish that becomes Kagel’s Mare Nostrum, an abyss as glossy as a python’s skin, covering all and concealing everything in an apparent, luxuriant beauty. The omnivorous quality of luxury”.
Ho Tzu Nyen will direct the live filming of a movie in which the entire Flu水o installation is considered as an open theatre set, a single, complex scenic object, a long take of happenings, references and gestures. The film is not aimed at documenting, but at working on the actions by means of visual solutions that will illustrate the opera Mare Nostrum as an element on the surface, while the artists’ performances will shine as if they were at the bottom of the sea, with us humans watching from above.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Flu水o
Pirelli HangarBicocca
Thursday November 25 and Friday November 26, 8 PM
Tickets (20 €) via Milano Musica
Event duration: approx. 2 hours
Currently enforced rules concerning Covid-19 will be applied.
PRESS CONTACTS PCM Studio di Paola C. Manfredi Via Carlo Farini, 70 – 20159 Milan www.paolamanfredi.com Carlotta Biffi |e. carlotta@paolamanfredi.com | m. +39 345 3924956
Coordination
Paolo Mele, Ramdom
+39 320 7061409
About the artists
Alessandro Sciarroni is an Italian artist active in the field of Performing Arts with several years of experience in visual arts and theater research. His works are featured in contemporary dance and theater festivals, museums and art galleries, as well as in unconventional spaces and involve professionals from different disciplines. He is capable of creating an empathic relationship with the audience. His works often start with a naturally occurring phenomenon followed by music and choreography. Among other recognitions, in 2019 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance by the Venice Biennial. He collaborated with various kinds of artists and his works have been presented in 21 European countries, as well as Canada, Brazil, Uruguay and United Arab Emirates.
Davide Quadrio is a producer and curator based between China and Italy. From 1998 to 2010 he founded and directed the BizArt Art Center, the first non-profit artistic-creative workshop in Shanghai. In 2007 he established Arthub, a production and curatorial proxy working in China and worldwide. Hosted by Shanghai Visual Art Institute from 2011 and 2017, he curated and produced the monumental City Pavilion Project – representing 38 cities from around the globe – on the occasion of the Shanghai Biennial in 2012. From 2013 to 2016 he was curating the contemporary art section of the Aurora Museum in Shanghai. In 2015 he founded Kaleidoscope Asia, a publication twinned with Kaleidoscope Magazine. With BizArt and Arthub, David Quadrio organized hundreds of exhibitions, educational programs and cultural exchanges in China and all over the world. He produced the 13th Gwangju Biennial, Korea.
Luciana Galliano is musicologist and scholar of music aesthetics. She combines competence in contemporary music and a deep knowledge of Japanese music. After her doctorate at Tokyo University of Arts, she collaborated with Luciano Berio in his Norton lectures (1993-1994). She has lectured widely in Japan and internationally and taught Comparative Musicology and Composition in non-European Countries at the University Ca’ Foscari Venezia. Galliano’s books include Yōgaku: A History of Japanese Music in the 20th Century (Scarecrow 2002); Power, Beauty and Meaning: Eight Studies on Chinese Music (ed., Ohlschki 2005); and The Music of Jōji Yuasa (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012, presently being translated into Japanese).
Andrea Anastasio was born in Rome in 1961, he lives between Naples and Mumbai. After training in oriental studies and philosophy, he embarked on numerous collaborative projects as a designer, a field in which he still works, for Artemide, Danese, Foscarini and Memphis, before moving to India in 1991. Alongside his professional activity, he devotes his time to his artistic practice. His research focuses on the manipulation of objects, consumer goods and materials linked to the domestic context, in order to generate linguistic short circuits, while sabotaging their conventional meaning. He is interested in the potential convergences of conceptual art with design. He was artist in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, in 2005 and 2008 and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in various Italian and international museums, including: Grand Palais-Paris, Museum of Modern Art and Architecture Dallas -USA, MART Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento-Rovereto, la Triennale, Milan, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio-USA, Achille Castiglioni Foundation (2018), Palazzo Reale Milano, Yuz Museum Shanghai (2019), Foundation Darat Al Fanun Amman-Jordan, MANN Naples National Archaeological Museum (2020).
Arnaud Arbet studied at the Grenoble Conservatory, the Paris Conservatory and the Berlin University of the Arts. From 2007 to 2009 he was maître repetiteur at the Paris’ National Opera, working with Seiji Ozawa and Semyon Bychkov. Later, he assisted Gerard Mortier at the Teatro Real in Madrid and collaborated with the Salzburg Festival and in the opera houses of Rome, Cologne Amsterdam and Milan. He was engaged by the Teatro alla Scala of Milan as assistant of György Kurtág for the opera Fin de partie. He regularly works with Opera of Cologne. In 2016 he successfully directed the Die Eroberung von Mexico by Rihm and opened the season 2018-19 with Mare Nostrum by Kagel. His compositions have been published by the music publisher Vogelreiter in Munich.
Chiara Bersani is an Italian artist working in the performing arts. Her formative path takes place mainly in the field of theatrical research with influences from contemporary dance and performing art. She won an UBU award as top interpreter for Gentle Unicorn and the MdA Award for Heroes. She is a leader in the fields of modern and contemporary dance, as well as experimental theatre. Suffering a moderate form of Osteogenesis Imperfecta, she is interested in the political meaning that a body can just take with its own image when interacting with the society. In her works she often uses the idea of crisis to create collective thinking, using the body as a link between past and present. The collaborations with other artists and organizations are one of the key features of her artistic career. Among the most durable collaborations are those with Marco D’Agostin, Matteo Ramponi, Babilonia Teatri, the Madrid-based company La Tristura, the French choreographer Jérôme Bel and the Argentinian director and playwright Rodrigo Garcia.
Rossella Biscotti was born in Italy, currently she lives and works between Amsterdam and Bruxelles. Over her career she engaged with present and past history to explore the collective value of events with a strong – and sometimes even traumatic- value. Her work cuts across installation, sculpture, performance, sound works, and filmmaking. Stemming from extended research processes, personal encounters, interdisciplinary collaborations, and the interrogation of sites and stories, her works encapsulate meticulous stratifications of materials and meanings, delving deep into the history of her country, from Italy’s central role in ancient history, to the nation’s difficult past during the Years of Lead. Biscotti graduated at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples in 2002 and attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She has taken part in major international exhibitions such as Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh in 2020, the 55th Venice Biennale and the 13th Istanbul Biennale in 2013, DOCUMENTA 13 at Kassel in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2019), Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, in Switzerland (2018), and V–A–C Foundation, Moscow, (2016). She received several awards including ACACIA Prize for Contemporary Art in and Mies van der Rohe Stipendium.
Silvia Calderoni is a performer, actress and author of the Italian contemporary artistic scene and research. Her education, developed outside the traditional academies and into the heart of the independent experimental theatre, began with the choreographer and dancer Monica Francia, the choreographer and dance-maker Cristina Rizzo during the study project Open and the Teatrino Clandestino company. In 2002 and 2003 she joined the school “Imparare è anche bruciare” directed by the Teatro della Valdoca, with Cesare Ronconi and Mariangela Gualtieri.
Ilenia Caleo graduated in Philosophy at the Università di Bologna and she is currently a research fellow with the IUAV in Venice for the visual arts lab leaded by Annalisa Sacchi. Since 2000 she is a performer and actress of the contemporary art field and she collaborated with several theatre companies and directors. She took part in the production of Nella tempesta and Raffiche by Motus. She works with Iaph Italia and OperaViva. She is an activist with the Teatro Valle Occupato and in the commons and queer-feminist movements.
Elena Casoli is a Milanese guitarist. She studied at the Conservatorio “G. Verdi” and at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and she won several national and international competitions. She collaborated with different symphonic ensemble and institutions such as the CRT Milano, the Teatro alla Scala and the Cantiere Internazionale of Montepulciano. She performs solo and chamber formations. She als founded LArecords, an independent brand focused on the meeting between music and literature and she holds classes in Italy, Sweden, Germany and Argentina.
Silvia Gribaudi is an Italian choreographer who also specialises in performing arts in general. Since 2004 she has focused her research on the social impact of bodies, having set at the centre of her choreographic language the comic element and the relationship between audience and performers. She has taken part in several artistic research projects, including CHOREOROAM (2011), TRIPTYCH (2013), ACT YOUR AGE (2014) – an EU project about active ageing through the art of dance, which inspired the performance WHAT AGE ARE YOU ACTING?, as well as the community project OVER 60; PERFORMING GENDER (2015); CORPO LINKS CLUSTER (2019/2020), where the connection of dance, the mountains, and the mountain community gave life to the site specific project TREKKING COREOGRAFICO (choreographic trekking) and to the piece MONJOUR (2021), produced by Torinodanza Festival in collaboration with Teatro Stabile del Veneto and Brussels’s Les Halles de Schaerbeek. In 2021 she has been a guest choreographer at “Danser Encore, 30 solos pour 30 danseurs”, a project for the Opéra de Lyon. Her shows have been featured in a number of national and international festivals and are the result of a creative process that focuses on dialogue and on the poetic encounter with other artists, dance companies, and communities.
Attila Favarelli is a sound artist and an electro-acoustic musician. He conceives sound as a material and relational phenomenon, exploring with his research the links between sound, space and body. His solo work has been published by Senufo Editions and Die Schachtel; he performed in duo with Andrea Belfi (Tumble) on Die Schachtel, with Nicola Ratti on Boring Machines and with Nicola Martini on Presto!. He created, together with Enrico Malatesta and Nicola Ratti, the Tilde trio. He performed in Europe, USA, China and South Korea. In 2010 he participated at the 12. Venice Biennale of Architecture; since 2011 he curates Lift, a cycle of concerts focused on experimental music. In 2012 he was the Italian curator for the project Sounds of Europe. He founded and curates Aural Tools, a series of sound objects documenting the material and conceptual development of sound production carried out by a selection of musicians.
Ho Tzu Nyen was born in Singapore. He earned a BA in Creative Arts and an MA in Southeast Asian Studies. Besides extensively writing on art, he works primarily in film, video, and performance. He recently worked on major multimedia installations. Ho appropriates the structures of epic myths, invoking their grandeur while revealing them to be not merely stories, but discursive tools. He is particularly concerned with those moments when contemporary figures imagine and invent the past in order to serve the needs of the present. He joined several group exhibitions and international film festivals. He represented Singapore at the 54. Venice Biennale (2011). His works have been presented over solo exhibitions in Singapore, Adelaide, Sydney and at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Muna Mussie began her artistic career in 1998 working as actress and performer with the Teatro Clandestino. Since 2001 she has been an active member of the research group Open, a project through which she approached new ways of being on scene with the performance opentolikemunamussie (2004). Her work explores the performing arts languages to give form to the strain between different expressive hubs, ranging over key-words such as gesture, vision and word. Among her productions: Più che piccola, media (2007), Ti ho sognato ma non eri il protagonista (2010), Monkey See, Monkey Do, the installation and performance Milite Ignoto (2015) and the performance Oasi (2018).
Yuka Ohta is a Japanse drummer. She was born in Hyogo, Japan, and studied in Tokyo, Detmold and attended the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt. In 2012-2013 she joined the international Ensemble Modern Academie. She plays the drums with the Enseble Garage and with the Ohta-Ramos. She is very well-known as solo performer and as a member of several chamber ensembles: she played with the Stadttheater Gießen and the Frankfurter Gesellschaftorchester. She i salso a scholarship owner for DAAD, Kunststiftung NRW and Internationale Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik.
Anna Raimondo uses voice and listening as a platform for encounter, collaboration and exchange, as tools for the diffraction of identities. Questioning the limits between genders, both private and public, she activates or deconstructs cultural practices to encourage and reveal the fluid notions of identity. She completed an MA in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication (UAL, London, UK) and runs a practice-based Phd between Arba (Royale Académie de Beaux Arts) and ULB University in Brussels (BE) “New genders of listening: voices, bodies and territories”. She has participated in several international solo and collective exhibitions including: « Io dico Io » at la Galleria Nazionale in Rome in 2021 (IT) ; « Brx Universelle II – Multipli.city » at La Centrale for Contemporary Art in Brussels (BE) ; manifesta13 Marseille in 2020 (FR); the solo show “Fronte Nazionale Naso Partenopeo” at Albumarte in 2020 (Roma, IT); “Signale – Espaces Réciproques” at the Friche la Belle de Mai in 2020 (Marseille, FR); “Nada que declarar” at Matienzo in 2019 (Buenos Aires, AR); “Seremos serias de la manera más alegre” at Casa del Bicentenario in 2018 (Buenos Aires, AR); the collective show “Africa is not an island” at MACAAL Museum in 2018 (Marrakech, MA); “Biennale de Casablanca” in 2018 (MA); the 13th Dakar Biennal in 2018 (SN); “New boundaries of the wellness of vagynal ecosystem” at TEA Museum in 2018 (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, ES) and at Ex Elettrofonica Gallery in 2017 (Rome, IT); documenta14 at SAVVY Gallery en 2017 (DE) ; “Nous serions sérieuses de la manière la plus heureuse” at Le Cube in 2017 (Rabat, MA); “Mi porti al mare?” at the MAAC in 2016 (Brussels, BE); Tsonami Sound Arts Festival in 2017 (Valparaiso, CH); “loading…casa” in the frame of the Dubai Design Week in 2017 ; “You must change your life” at Stuk in 2015 (Leuven, BE); “Everyone has a sense of rhythm” at the Draf in 2015 (London, GB); the Marrakech Biennial in 2014 (MA); etc. She has won the prize of the city in the frame of the contemporary art prize Médiatine in 2018 and the Palma Ars Acustica in 2016.
Kai Wessel is a counter-tenor. He was born in Hamburg and he studied music theory, composition and voice at the Lübeck Academy of Music, baroque performance practice at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and in Hilversum. Over the following years he pursued a meaningful artistic career and excelling in the ancient music field. He also received several prestigious public awards, including the Bruges Festival. Besides, he has been a teaching voice and historical performing praxis.
CHAMBER ENSEMBLE “GIORGIO BERNASCONI” AT THE TEATRO ALLA SCALA
The Accademia Teatro alla Scala – currently leaded by Giuseppe Vita and directed by Luisa Vinci – is considered one of the most respected ensemble performing live from the artistic, technical and management point of view. The course program is structured in four departments – Music, Dance, Labs and Management – collecting about thirty classes attended by over 1600 students each year. Since 2012, Marco Angius curates the artistic coordination of the “Giorgio Bernasconi” Ensemble, an inedited educational project conceived to allow the Master’s students to deepen an hardly addressed literature field. The main goal is to introduce the students on one hand to the Twentieth Century and modern literature; on the other, to the contemporary research. The educational program involves very well-known conductors focused on this repertoire, supported by the Teatro alla Scala orchestra. It also includes an intense live activity at the Teatro alla Scala, as well as other prestigious institutions.