two channel installation (52’09” loop, color, 4 channel audio) and video (6’33”, 1:1, color, stereo) The Netherlands-Italia 2020-2022

Work realized in the framework
of the Charlois Foundation’s Residency aan het Water State of the City, Rotterdam 2020
thanks to the support of CBK’Rotterdam and the grant nctm e l’arte: Artists-in-Residence 2019 from Nctm Studio Legale, Milan.

A video call between two river monuments: the Maas and the Nile. Their stone faces speak, animated by the changing light, at the moment of transition from night to day. What would those two rivers have said to each other on the Spring Equinox 2020.

That day I recorded a new animal vociferousness in the urban streets during the video call activated between the two monuments, between 5:29 a.m. (sunrise in Naples) and 6:21 a.m. (sunrise in Rotterdam). An unusual sound even at dawn. Europe was on its first look-down, while the Black Lives Matter movement had not yet begun to hoard colonial monuments. In those days, people were rediscovering new possible sound dimensions in cities: the rediscovered silence brought animals closer to urban areas; the background noise of the seas regained its calm and Jacques Cousteau’s quotations from the famous novel ‘The World of Silence’ (1956) raged on social media. A brief dream about a different normality.

What was happening globally was a radical sound experience: on the collaborative and free online audio archives, users were sharing the sounds of sapiens absence from Venice to Naples, from Barcelona to Tokyo, from Cairo to Miami.

In the installation Sunrise Gods’Call, the dialogue between the two monuments is nourished by these sound documents, this urgency. It invites viewers into a time loop where a short sound utopia (aka relational dystopia) flows.
Through two large monitors (70”), the work evokes the instrument used for the action, those banal mobile phones, vehicles of human contact, magnified to monumental proportions.