Indagini nel museo polisensoriale

22/02/2012

Sound helps real social commitment?

Evento Bordeaux

(art pour une ré-évolution urbaine), 6 - 16 October 2011



  scarica: mp3

registrato il 6/10/2011 durata 01'47''

The challenge faced by director Michelangelo Pistoletto, I've been told, was to make the Biennial "Evento Bordeaux" 2011 into something that would truly engage an entire city, not just a restricted artworld audience. The major effort of social "outreach" was a rare case of going beyond good intentions and lip service, producing very concrete interaction between art and the local population. Sound/music was a big part of this successful strategy.
An intense program of exhibitions, concerts, workshops, impromptu gatherings in public places, sound parades, including forays into outlying suburbs usually overlooked by major cultural happenings. For the whole sound/music program organized with the help of Sound Res see here .
The list of names is too long to include here; in the recording you're hearing the great Sikh singer Madan Gopal Singh, who also worked together with contemporary musicians in a number of concerts, then a small snip of the nocturnal sound parade with hundreds of "boomboxes" by Phil Kline (one of his Unsilent works, electronic compositions split into many parts on cassette or CD played on boomboxes carried by people walking around the city in a large group, a series that began in 1992 in NY for Christmas).
The last sample is from Panic Box by Steve Piccolo, part of the mix for Radio Grenoble of hundreds of vocal non-verbal recordings made in total solitude and privacy by residents of the Grand Parc suburb of Bordeaux (more info)