Guide to listening
need to interrogate the sky (about 70’)

The title of the cycle is taken from ‘Kolumbus’ by F. Hölderlin [Mandruzzato, Adelphi 769]
I, II, III, IV are respectively the fragments 145,111,16 and 20 of the Chaldaean Oracles [Tonnelli, Coliseum]

I

An exploration without purpose, following a song towards the places which will come, towards all the places simultaneously. There, the body/instrument may become a means of access to a listening which almost succeeds in transcending the ear: perceiving the different qualities of vibrating, feeling the threshold which rationally separates a sound from a light from an emotion from a memory and, through the positioning of the threshold, to sense the possible continuity between them.

Open, with no directionality, I simply listen to the living of a world.

I would like to be the precipitate of the work of these years: finding myself alone, faced with the human precariousness of these sounds, the need to listen to them and reflecting on the reason for this need. It is a questioning of the distance which they carry within themselves – living nucleus – of the sound which appears there.
Slow. The opening of a resonant world in which nothing is lost.

II

The stability of I begins to fluctuate in a centripetal acceleration, the positions become place-qualities, a family tree, a participating presence like manifest distance: the proliferation of this thread leads to a gradual transformation of the sound; the formation of a directionality becomes increasingly evident.

Every place fits into a chain of places which tends towards transforming the static fragmentation of the positions into a single movement. Here an alignment is attempted (Maeshowe: that ray of sunshine in the winter solstice), the search for the key common to different positions which could link up even places greatly distant from one another.

III

Those places in which the form feels something is missing, where the proof of the body is lost, the references become weaker and the space dominant: a sound which succeeds in speaking of the silence, in understanding the silence - then the breathing, like a spider with its web sailing over the emptiness.

IV

An ascending thread guided from within, the choice of form from the very beginning impacts on the continuity of a supposed frequency which displays itself by refraction in a sequence of spaces, different positions, interpretable in relation to the formal place they are crossing.

The image: there was a big tree, I could see its trunk, its base and its outline; I did not have an overall view of the tree, only trunk and trunk, the opening up of a possibility, a branch, its strength, only the initial part and the continuation of the trunk still interrupted, time and again, becoming a branch in turn and the vertical movement pushing up in the middle of the horizon, more and more in the gradual opening of the main branches, the secondary branches until a multitude of solitary angles occurred, on a knife edge between the attraction of the earth and that of the sun.

The third last, penultimate and in part the last movement of IV are perhaps the final materialisation of this trunk reached from a different approach the other way round, to the solitary angles of the trunk, the materialisation of its (invisible) strength.