Allora & Calzadilla’s first time in Milan for Fondazione Nicola Trussardi

Entering the Cusani Palace feels like leaving the chaotic noise of the city of Milan to step into a great carillon. With the exhibition Fault Lines, Nicola Trussardi Fundation presents for the first time in Italy a solo show of duo Allora & Calzadilla, composed by Jennifer Allora and her cuban partner Guillermo Calzadilla. Their art has always been activist, it insinuates its reflection within the most ‘deaf’ dynamics  of social and political life, giving it a choral voice. Now, entering the courtyard of the baroque building in Via Brera, we are greeted by five young opera singers who, from the inside of tunnels digged into a monumental conglomerate sculpture made of polyurethane, interpret the public speeches of great historical and political figures such as Martin Luther King, Nikita Khrushchev, the Dalai Lama, and Saddam Hussein.

After logging in to the great Grand Staircase, a jazz trumpeter plays the military alarm beating the rhythm of the performance Wake Up (Rising) step by step, accompanying the rise of the visitor to the halls of the palace. On the walls of the imposing Radetzky Hall, two large paintings Afghanistan Halloween V and VII of the series Intermission are exhibited. Two inks on canvas, products of manual printing from a wooden matrix, representing an unusual scene actually happened in the desert of Afghanistan, where a group of Marines dressed up as comic book superheroes during Halloween. A curious scenery act as backdrop to the installation / performance Stop, Repair, Prepare: variation of Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, which has a dedicated place within the grand ballroom. For this work Allora & Calzadilla have cut a circular hole in a Bechstein grand piano of the ’20s; from the inside of the cabinet, a pianist is trying to play he Beethoven’s 9th Symphony from backwards.

 


The symphony that history has chosen as brotherhood hymn throughout the world, as sound background to the great revolutions and civil wars of the ’900. Let’s move to Garibaldi Room, were the video Returning a Sound is shown. A guy goes on a motorcycle to the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, with a trumpet attached to the muffler: it is a painful evocation of music, shamelessly adapted from war bombing. To reach the Braida Hall, our passage is hindered by the performance Revolving Door, where thirteen dancers play the military march, cutting in half the room with the rows, allowing us to access the next room until they break ranks. In the Allegories’ Hall we find the first trilogy video  dedicated to the relationship between nature and mankind, whose music is the combinatorial element. In Raptor’s Rapture, presented last year at Documenta, Bernadette Kaffer is portrayed; a musician specialized in prehistoric tools, that in the video plays a 35,000 years old flute, made with griffin’ wingbones; the same bird that in the video seems a counterpoint to the flautist from a perch.

As an extra-diegetic accompaniment to the video, the singer Tim Storms proposes again that concert, and thanks to a special extension of the vocal cords, he can touch the lower humanly reachable frequencies. His gloomy voice in the background image of the skeletons, impose the video a primordial ritual’s aura. 3, is third episode of the trilogy, in which the movie camera rings around a paleolithic statuette; the Venus de Lespugne, dating dating back to 25,000 years ago. It’s one of the oldest representations of the human body ever filmed. According to mathematician Ralph Abraham and philosopher William Thompson, all Mother Goddess’ deformed and accentuated measures for propitiatory purposes, correspond perfectly to the diatonic scale. On this scale, composer David Lang wrote a score for cello, performed by cellist Maya Beiser. The trilogy has been fully presented to the public for the first time in an exhibition. Fault Lines is the celebration of a dense research, whose rhythm is constantly beaten by the flow of history, and voraciously by militant voices who won’t surrender their presence to the inexorability of time and social condition, leaving its mark drying in the clay as the photographic work Land Mark (Footprints).

ALLORA & CALZADILLA, FAULT LINES, the first major solo exhibition in Italy by JENNIFER ALLORA & GUILLERMO CALZADILLA, FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI, Palazzo Cusani, MILANO October 22 – November 24, 2013