Cantieri in Movimento – Industrial Heritage Soundscape
1 January 2022 — 10 October 2022
Cantieri in Movimento – Industrial Heritage Soundscape is an international audiovisual artist collaboration project initiated by Zō Centro Culture Contemporanee (Italy), Curva Minore (Italy), a Zentralwerk (Germany), Nova Synagoga (Slovakia) and IZOLYATSIA foundation.
Seven artists from Italy and eight artists from Europe collaborated and exchanged their knowledge and experience in working with music, performance and visual arts. Five cultural centres located in repurposed industrial buildings enabled selected artists to develop and present reflections about the history and heritage of those places with artistic language.
Project participants worked between January and October of 2022, online and in the form of short residencies in each of the locations, to absorb the local history and industrial context and use it in their final performances.
The team of IZOLYATSIA consisted of actress and musician Marina La Placa (Italy), Bohdan Aleksieienko (visual artist) and Oleksandr Sirous (media artist).
Due to the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation to Ukraine, the Ukrainian team couldn’t take part in the Soledar residency, and all the work had been done online.
The project aims to provide innovative tools and new artistic expertise to foster mobility and transnational collaborations.
PROJECT PARTNERS
Zō Centro Culture Contemporanee, a project leader, is located on the former sulfur refinery site in Catania, Italy. Curva Minore (based at the Zisa Shipyards in Palermo, Italy), IZOLYATSIA (with a project based on a topic of a former salt mine in Soledar), the Nova Synagoga (a former train station in Zilina, Slovakia) and the Zentralwerk (based in a former sewing machines, typewriters and weapons factory in Dresden, Germany).
SALICORNIA PROJECT
Salicornia is a salt-specific performance produced by Marina La Placa, Bohdan Aleksieienko and Oleksandr Sirous.
Salicornia is a succulent plant able to grow in saline conditions that surround the area of Soledar. Facing the paradox of building our site-specific performance without a site, the project team realised the need to “adjust” our structure to adapt to such a hostile environment, acting exactly as the Salicornia plant does.
Salicornia project is an audio-visual performance consisting of two main elements flowing along together:
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a sound poem, created with the help of all the musicians involved in the Cantieri in Movimento – Industrial Heritage Soundscape who agreed to join;
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a visual poem, acting accordingly with sound in a sonic coordinate system.
The starting point for the audio is a field recording from Ukraine, recorded by us in the first days of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Each participant processed the original audio file according to their sensibility, and the team collected all the musical translations of the original recording that will become layers of the composition. These layers are live mixed with an interactive tool (Leap motion).
Every “remix” in the final composition corresponds to its visual generative system in a sonic “coordinate system”. The visual system draws inspiration from natural processes and chemical reactions that involve salt and other processes, changing the point of view on the destruction/creation of matter.
The performance also included real Artemsil salt, brought to Sicily directly from Soledar, to tell the story of the city’s salt mines and destruction made by the Russian army.
The final performance occurred on the 29th and 30th of September, in Zō Centro Culture Contemporanee, in Palermo, Italy.
