Resident artists (RESIDENZE KATE)
Season 2021
FABRIZIO SAIU
Fabrizio Saiu, mover-performer-sonic artist, works in the fields of experimental music and performing arts, giving special attention to the concert form, to collective actions, and to environmental behaviours, where environment, body movement, and sound are the central elements. During his residency at Tempo Reale he will focus his research on the development of Karen, a speech synthesis algorithm controlled with motion sensors. The study period aims to develop Métron Extended, a concert for an athlete-musician, 35 percussion cymbals, and a speech device. The concert’s musical practice is articulated as a training session at the limits between sound action and art du déplacement.
MARTA BELLU & AGNESE BANTI
In a double residency at Tempo Reale and at the Murate Art District, the choreographer and dancer Marta Bellu (who investigates the choreographic language in relation to musical composition) and the musician and sound artist Agnese Banti (attracted by the dialogue between the body’s gestures, the physicality of sound, and spatial relationships) work on the simultaneous construction of a musical and choreographic score, that can be traced through space using lines, points, and the words of a language that is made material, bringing in specific qualities and sensitivities. These words/hands – containers of sensitivity – that express themselves with gestures of the body and of sound, as in the work’s title, I versi delle mani (the voices of hands) emerge from the dialogue between the line of artistic research and the specific expressive inspirations of Laura Lucioli, to whom this artistic research project is dedicated and for whom it was conceived. As a matter of fact, I versi delle mani is the first professional project as a dancer for Laura Lucioli, who began her research on movement along with Marta Bellu in 2014 and who to this day continues her examination of contemporary dance. I versi delle mani is a production by Versiliadanza, created thanks to the contribution of Tempo Reale’s KATE Residencies programme, co-produced by Murate Art District, supported by the Municipality of Florence, Associazione Mus.e, and MAD Murate Art District.
Season 2020
STEFANO DE PONTI
Stefano De Ponti is a multimedia artisan and restless observer who over the years has collaborated with many international organisations and institutions, publishing and presenting his works in Europe, Russia, Canada, and the United States. In 2019 he started the La natura delle cose ama celarsi (“The nature of things loves to hide”) research itinerary: a constantly evolving project that faces the dynamics of massification and accumulation of creation and fruition processes, seen in conjunction with the inevitable impermanence that unites all things. In particular, the project segment De Ponti is currently working on, with a double residency at Tempo Reale and at NUB Project Space [see: licheni], concerns the design and construction of the Transient Mobile: a portable monophonic device with an inert and anonymous appearance, which in this first version looks similar to a stone stele with no ornamentation. Each multiple integrates a device which contains unique sounds within, with no duplicate available, all differing in quality, organisation, and length. The fruition of sounds only occurs and lasts during “the moment” and the only adjustable parameters are the choice of the location and the disposition of the listener.
MARIA CATERINA FRANI & SIMONE FARACI
The collaboration between actor, performer, and speaker Maria Caterina Frani and musician and composer Simone Faraci has originated Ho una voglia di andare a Parigi – Notturno per voce e elettronica intorno a Amelia Rosselli (“I have a longing to go to Paris – nocturnal for voice and electronics on Amelia Rosselli”). This project, born from the musical suggestions in the works of poet, editor, and music scholar Amelia Rosselli, is a research that experiments a dialogue between poetic text and musical composition, where words swerve and explode, opening up to new landscapes of sound. Within this flow, presence is complete and the vision that emerges is the result of a blending of elements. There is no dramaturgical construction connected to the poet’s biography or bibliography, instead the work adopts a pace that adapts to the rhythm without dwelling on the meaning. The literary components blend with the sound environment, and the result fuses into the composition of new possible scenarios. Thanks to its nature as a sonic research, this work can also be suitable for radio, as well as for the stage.
Season 2019
GIULIA VISMARA
An electroacoustic composer, sound designer, and sound artist, Giulia Vismara conducts research on the dynamic relationship between sound space and body, based on the possibility of stimulating the feeling of spatiality through sound, with an investigation on the very meaning of the concept of space. Her main interest is the organic nature of sound and the creation of textures which blend concrete and synthetic elements. Listening, in itself, is considered part of the experience of space. The focus of her current research, including her residency at Tempo Reale, is sound spatialisation and the use of 3D techniques and multi-channel systems. Furthermore, during her residency she has worked with the violist Augusto Vismara, her father, to construct a sound dialogue between her electroacoustic language and his instrumental language.
DANIELA CATTIVELLI
An electroacoustic music composer, sound artist, and performer, the focus of her artistic career has for years been oriented towards interdisciplinary practices, and from a formal point of view her work is expressed through a multiplicity of formats: sound performances, live audio-video sets, sound sculptures, live electronics, concerts, and more. A winner of numerous prizes and awards, and former collaborator of Tempo Reale, along with the ensemble she has created the Treatise, a score by the English composer Cornelius Cardew consisting of 193 pages of graphic signs to be “re-codified” into sound. She will present an artistic project with actual electro-acoustic bird calls at its centre, as used by birdwatchers or hunters in order to recall birds to a specific place. Her research on these specific bird calls is aimed towards the creation of an artistic project with the device itself at its centre, as a means of sound production and diffusion, without having to resort to other amplification systems.
Season 2018
GIOVANNI LAMI
A sound artist and musician dealing with electro-acoustic research and sound ecology since 2009, his everyday research is oriented towards what could be considered “sound rejection”: degradation and decay processes, border areas of listening, in relation to the intrinsic imperfection of the means used and to the study of magnetic tape intended as a substrate in constant evolution. He will present research begun between June and July 2015 with residences in Austria, Greece, and Veneto, in a project connected to memory and emptiness. Magnetic tapes have been buried for months in various environmental conditions, to ensure that they degrade in a totally unpredictable and irreversible manner. The degraded sounds emitted by the tapes are inserted in long loops, where even the tiniest event affects and influences all others in a never-ending change.
RICCARDO LA FORESTA
A drummer, composer, and improviser hailing from Modena, trained between Italy and New York, he has performed throughout Europe and collaborated with important musicians such as Alex Dörner, Stefano Battaglia, Michel Doneda, and many others. Already having performed for Tempo Reale on the occasion of Tools For Music, in September 2017, this time the composer will present a study on the ideal amplification of the Drummophone instrument in a live setting, thus evaluating the possibilities of stereophonic and quadraphonic sound to be obtained from an apparently monophonic source through the use of various types of microphones, considering different possible microphone points.
GIANLUCA VERLINGIERI
An internationally active composer, author of an electronic research which is always original, during his residence in Tempo Reale he worked with the poet Pier Luigi Berdondini on a project on the interaction of voice and electronics, developing, among other things, with the help of the sound engineer Dario Giordano, a new instrument, the canneparlanti. In this project, the electronic processing and reproduction of sound through loudspeakers is combined with the “physical” effect of acoustic resonance of tubular elements. Recovered materials, leftovers from building sites, and disused organ pipes are acoustically “reborn”, mounted on a post similar to an ancient positive organ, and carefully listened to internally by a forest of microphones: a second “phonatory apparatus” to be added to that of the poet Berdondini.
EMMANUEL HOLTERBACH
A sound artist and concrete music composer, Holterbach creates performances, compositions, and installations for which he has coined the term “acusmagia” (“acousmagic”). He is the curator of the Eliane Radigue archives, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the works of the great French composer. During his stay at Tempo Reale, he worked on acoustic training with the Blutwurst collective, taking late Renaissance songs as a starting point. In these works, the intervals of the melodic lines were explored in a dilated temporal dimension, in order to elaborate a non-directional musical form with no predetermined duration. Holterbach’s research has focused on revisiting in a personal key a repertoire that is unusual for him, and on studying, with the group, new performative solutions halfway between structure and free interaction of instruments.
FABIO MONNI
Graduated in piano, organ, and composition at “G.P. da Palestrina” in Cagliari, Fabio Monni is developing a project which attempts to acknowledge the characteristics of six locations within the city of Florence, their distinctive traits, the way they reflect the lives and humanity of their inhabitants, their rhythms. The project is an attempt to discover a dialogue between different spaces, and to replace the passive listening of a specific urban sound landscape with an active, aware, and creative form of listening. The sonic landscape would therefore be transformed into a source of inspiration for a series of electroacoustic compositions. The project, divided into multiple phases, begins with a study and classification of the sonic landscape and reaches pure compositional abstraction, after going through four separate phases of metabolising and re-working the original material.
Season 2017
ENRICO MALATESTA
A percussionist and independent researcher active in experimental settings, drawing the line between music, performance, and site-specific intervention, Enrico Malatesta’s activity explores the relationship between sound, space, and movement, as well as the vitality of materials with special attention to surfaces, ways of listening, and the definition of multiple information using an ecological and sustainable approach to percussion instruments. His residence centred on Belabor, a project designed to delve deeper into recent intuitions regarding drums and the morphology of surfaces involving a personal research of the actions of beating and listening.
VINCENZO SCORZA
Vincenzo Scorza’s research and audio productions are centred on the meeting point between music and technology, with a number of projects based on the live electronics formula and on specific types of improvisation. During his residency he has collaborated with Sandro Carotti for the work titled CREAZIONE (0), a live set for reciting voice and electronics based on the words in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, which are spliced, destroyed, and recreated by the two artists in an attempt to understand their most profound emotional and musical meaning, trapped within the conventional structures of language.
ANDREA BORGHI
A sound artist and electroacoustic composer, Andrea Borghi’s work is centred on the relationship between sound and matter. The Superelief project develops the possibility to create surface casts of a specific area or material using rubber, resin or plaster. These molds are then recreated as a positive, obtaining relief surfaces which will then be “played” by a record player prepared with special needles so as to transform the morphological characteristics of the surfaces into hearable sound, along with other different characteristics such as hardness, porosity, density, or roughness.
CLAUDIA ROSELLI AND NICOLA DI CROCE
Claudia Roselli, urban researcher and artist, has invited the musician, urban researcher, and field recording expert Nicola di Croce to collaborate on her project titled Inshallah-Shalom, based on the analysis of a new urban situation where different human types and ethnicities meet, the Sant’Ambrogio neighbourhood in Florence. This phase of the project expands the study of sound landscapes present in specific places in the neighbourhood with the intention of creating sonic landscapes starting from actual recordings, but also based on imaginary cultural landscapes which are particularly connected to the project’s themes.
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