wallofsounds is an international festival of contemporary music and arts conceived, organised and directed by Gaetano La Rosa with the intention of enhancing the city’s monumental heritage with music events, ranging from experimental to contemporary classical, from sound art to radical improvisation, inviting leading players from the international music scene. In the first edition, we presented, among other things, the world premiere of The Mayfield – from a project by and with Heiner Goebbels, as part of Transeuropa Festival/BAM – Biennale Arcipelago del Mediterraneo (BAM), one of the greatest artists, composers and directors of contemporary music theatre. In 2020, after the extraordinary welcome, beauty and acoustic quality of the venue of the Auditorium SS. Salvatore, we experienced the thrill of live streaming the concerts from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a sacred Serpotta site, world famous for its extraordinary altarpiece, the Nativity by Caravaggio, stolen about fifty years ago. And for Unshaped, the installation by the famous multimedia artist group Quiet Ensemble, another oratory decorated by Giacomo Serpotta’s stuccoes, the San Mercurio. Because even in the age of pandemics, we must never lack beauty.
PROGRAM:
3 December 2022 – Archivio Storico Comunale
Exhibition Opening: Croce Taravella / Carte Inedite 2010/2020 – 2022 / Curated by Gaetano La Rosa
P+C+A+S, “pietra + cemento + asfalto + sabbia” (2006), Installation video at Yuzi Paradise, Guilin, Cina
Twelve previously unpublished papers, made in 2010, on handmade paper from the Aetna paper mill in Acireale (CT) in large formats and unique grammage (1,200 g/m²), created for the artist, in tubs specially made to the required size, and subsequently reworked by the artist in mixed media, from 2020 to 2022. These will be juxtaposed with three prints, from the chronotype series (textured paper), also made on the same Aetna paper, in 2022.
Alongside the paper support, so closely related to the place where we are, we have placed the digital video P+C+A+S, “pietra + cemento + asfalto + sabbia” (2006), Installation video at Yuzi Paradise, Guilin, Cina , which recounts the realisation of the imposing land art installation created by Croce Taravella at Yuzi Paradise, Guilin, China, back in 2006, and never shown to the public.
11 December 2022 – Archivio Storico Comunale
Giovanni Damiani, piano solo / Musica contro suono
Concert on the occasion of the donation of Philip Corner’s archive to the Alessandro Scarlatti Conservatory in Palermo. Giovanni Damiani performs a programme that, in addition to Corner, also includes an overview of FLUXUS artists, for the 60th year since its foundation, compositions by Philip Corner, Sylvano Bussotti, Giovanni Damiani and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
17 December 2022 – San Giovanni Decollato
Francesco Cavaliere / Gancio Cielo 2015 / 2019 / Curated by Matteo Cappelletti
Francesco Cavaliere, visual artist, writer and musician born in Piombino in 1980 and raised in Volterra, lives and works between Berlin and Turin. His work is developed in a polymorphous activity that integrates writing, sound, voice, drawing and sculpture, which together aim to stimulate the imagination, undertaking long journeys traversed by ephemeral presences. He writes sound stories and musical compositions often integrated with installation and scenic elements. Over the years, he has developed a veritable dictionary cataloguing the metamorphic beings that inhabit his abstract and fantastic universe: hybrids of objects, animals, plants, planets, traces, cosmic objects and physical and perceptual phenomena generated by glass, minerals and voices recorded and performed with analogue technologies. “I am a talking scribe… my voice is a cloud, my pen hisses.”
The Gancio Cielo saga builds on a series of legendary live performances in 2015 that ended in 2019, resulting in two albums (In Search of the Third Turtle’s Eye & The Group Repels Comets) released by Hundebiss in 2015 and 2016, which then became part of Boomkat’s exclusive ‘Future Classics’ section.
18 December 2022 – Archivio Storico Comunale
Laboratorio Di Ricerca Musicale / Concert – Homage to Philip Corner
Laboratorio di Ricerca Musicale performs music by Philip Corner, on the occasion of the donation of the artist’s archive to the Conservatorio Alessandro Scarlatti in Palermo.
Laboratorio di Ricerca Musicale was founded in the 1980s by Dario Lo Cicero and a number of other young musicians and musicologists, with the aim of studying and disseminating music selected from a wide range, from the Middle Ages to contemporary music, with a focus on little-performed composers and repertoires. Formed as an association in 1996, in 2003 it inaugurated its own annual festival (“American Myths/American Myths”) in the presence of Philip Corner, with music and performances by himself and other Fluxus artists. The collaboration, which continued in the following years with concerts in Palermo and Naples by Philip Corner with musicians from the Laboratorio, left a deep mark on some of them, especially in their relation to improvisation with or without guidelines, i.e. scores in unconventional notation. On the occasion of Philip Corner’s impressive donation to the Conservatory Library in Palermo, entrusting it to the care of its librarian Dario Lo Cicero, a selection of his music will be performed with the following ensemble: Dario Lo Cicero, flutes, percussion; Manlio Speciale, violin, percussion; Antonio Tralongo, viola, percussion; Davide Mezzatesta, guitar, percussion; Mila Di Addario, piano, angelica glass harp, percussion.
MUQATA’A / Curated by Giorgio Mega, for Studio Rizoma
Muqata’a has been an emblematic figure in the Palestinian hip-hop and electronic scene since the early 2000s, with the Ramallah Underground Collective. After several instrumental solo albums including “Inkanakuntu” (2018) on Discrepant, he released “Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص” on Hundebiss in ’21. Here the sound becomes even more hypnotic and deconstructed, with a distinct mastery of beats and sample work with a political depth that brings out of the global removal the archive of Palestinian sound culture and the rawness of its contemporary reality.
Alessandro Bosetti / Plane / Talea
Polyphonic vocal solo for ‘impossible choir’, constructed by sampling thousands of fragments and pieces of voices and recomposing them into polyphonic garlands and textures. Alessandro Bosetti is a composer and sound artist with a particular interest in the musicality of language and in the voice as an autonomous object and expressive instrument. His works set up a dialogue between language, voice and sound within complex tonal and formal constructions, often marked by an oblique irony. He builds surprising devices on the relationship between music and language, to question aesthetic categories and listening postures. Born in Italy, he currently lives in Marseille, but has made a name for himself on the experimental music scene in Berlin, where in the decade 2000-2010 he played an active part in a profound transformation of sound languages (Ensemble Phosphor, compositions for the Kammerensemble Neue Musik, Die Maulwerker, Neuevocalsolisten Stuttgart) and on the experimental and creative radio scene in Germany and Europe (WDR, Deutschlandradio, Radio France…), for which he became a prolific author.