From Here to Ear in Milan
In its interesting cultural and artistic proposal, the Bicocca Hangar presents today an entertaining example of the French artist and musician Celeste Boursier-Mougenot. What she renders is an adaptation (curated by Andrea Lissoni) of the first exhibited sound installation at the Barbican Centre in London, which explores the relationship between sound, chaos, unexpected events and everyday life.
In the space of the cube it will be possible to find a visionary musical landscape, consisting of an electric guitar hanging in the air “played” by a group of birds, that with their flight and resting upon its strings, determine the time the music (or sounds) are heard. This is another invention of the French artist and composer, concentrating on her research of creating sounds from more distant objects of music. In other previous works she surprised the audience by transforming a vacuum cleaner in a harmonica and where silverware and dishes became percussion instruments, or she would also create street sounds producing them electro-negatively. But the birds is her most recent and suggestive experimentation because they not only create a visually interesting game, but also build a metaphor between flight and sound, which opens a deep reflection on the relationship between chance and causality. Is there casualty ? This ancient question, to which many responded with a fatalistic attitude, is resolved in this case in a more poetic and less dramatic way, coming close to avant-garde experimentation or Sonic Youth’s indie music
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was born in Nice in 1961. Her artistic training was not visual but musical: she studied at the Nice Conservatory and then devoted herself to composition. In the years between 1985 and 1994 she worked for the Pascal Rambert Theatre Company, a theater group dedicated to art and whose experiments were surely an inspiration for the artist. That was how, from the early 90′s, Boursier-Mougenot decided to pursue a musical and visual composition career, bringing to her work to the most dynamic fields of visual arts, and where her sound installations were received with great enthusiasm arousing much curiosity around the world.
In her approach to musical experimentation, especially in the relationship between music and silence, we find an interesting reference to John Cage, where music is a concept that encompasses much more than sound. Cage demostrates this idea with his masterpiece 4’33”a score that is made up of one word: “tacet”, (silent). Thus, for the full duration of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, viewers only hear silence, and all the noises that pollute it automatically are transformed into music. Perhaps a Coincidence?
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If you are interested in avant-garde art and have curiosity for an original project, do not miss the Boursier-Mougenot sample at the Bicocca Hangar We recommend that you rent apartments in Milan and enjoy this sound installation, open until the 4th of December
Translated by: Marc
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