Massimo Bartolini. Due qui / To Hear

Massimo Bartolini is representing Italy at the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia with the exhibition Due qui/To Hear, curated by Luca Cerizza.

Designed with two entrances, the exhibition Due qui/To Hear — presented with support from the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity — moves through three spaces built around various acoustic experiences and meeting points, suggesting the highly relational nature of sound. Visitors can enter an almost empty room where they are welcomed by a small sculpture of a Pensive Bodhisattva, a Buddhist figure who prefers thought to action. The drone of an organ pipe creates a sense of frozen time, a space of waiting. In the central room, a large scaffolding of pipes has been transformed into an organ playing a melody composed by Caterina Barbieri and Kali Malone. Visitors can walk through and sit down on a circular bench. At its centre is a pool where a wave constantly rises and falls, prompting a form of meditation, even a trance state. Coming out into the garden, they can listen to two stories about the cycle of birth/death (and regeneration): that of a tree (by Nicoletta Costa) and that of a human being (by Tiziano Scarpa). Further on, they will also hear a choral work (by Gavin Bryars). Hanging in the branches of a tree, these voices sing of a person who feels roots growing through him. They pin him down, but also bring him closer to others, to the Whole...

In 2006, Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, Co-founders of Magazzino Italian Art, commissioned Massimo Bartolini to create a site-specific work for the Olnick Spanu Art Program in Garrison, NY. The work, Conveyance (Vitalia), is a stainless steel concentric circular bench with a pool at the center that hosts a perpetual vertical wave.

Conveyance (Vitalia) is an interaction between movement and stillness: the wave creates a heartbeat, the rhythm of which transports the viewer to an ideal place of contemplation. With this work, the artist produces an event in which the physical experience in conjunction with the meditation inherent to it unify interior and exterior, individual and society, private and public, past and present.