Histoire et technique de la scénographie d'exposition
Beaux-Arts de Paris
Ensa Paris-Malaquais
Pavillon Bosio Monaco
Ensad Paris
L'entour
Giacomo Balla
Abstract action of light and colors to the music of Igor Stravinsky for Sergej Djagilev’s Ballets Russes, Teatro Costanzi, Rome 1917.
Reconstruction to scale by Elio Marchegiani, 1997, from Balla’s signed plans; technical execution by Mariano Boggia and Luisa Mensi; electronic circuit, lights and sound by Massimo Iovine; coordinator, Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco
196 7/8 x 216 9/16 x 216 9/16 in.
Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino
Luciano Chessa
Synesthetic Crossfades
Mercredi 27 mars 2024
In the pandemic years 2020-2022, my visual arts practice intensified. Though this was in part dictated by personal motivations, it was also dictated by practical concerns. If I couldn’t perform live, I surely could stay home and produce assemblages and watercolors. This was in keeping with a process that I also observed and thoroughly documented in my scholarship of the work of Futurist Luigi Russolo. In the years 1912-1914, by the way of synesthesia, and encouraged by a spiritual trajectory, Russolo progressively dropped painting to become the first known Western sound artist.
Weaving in counterpoint Russolo’s history and mine, in this lecture I will illustrate modalities in which artists have historically moved, synchronically and diacronically, through art disciplines and sensory fields: either switching from one to another, or cultivating more than one simultaneously; sometimes moving back and forth, sometimes privileging the gray area of an intermediality in-between fields and disciplines.
I believe that now perhaps more than ever Art fully belongs to Theatre. After all, isn’t the Theater—possibly even more than the Art Gallery or the Museum—that one space equipped since forever to make a viewer experience dynamism? Taking direct inspiration from Giacomo Balla’s set design for Diaghilev’s 1917 Feu d’Artifice at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, a new project for Théâtre Princesse Grace in Monaco will consist of a sculptural work that sits on a theater stage but whose shape spills out of the stage’s confinement to take over the space directly above the audience seats. This three-dimensional shape—11 vibrating ropes that are spotlit by narrow cones of stage lights is animated, given life, through techniques that are more proper of the theater: rotating lights, mechanical set machineries, motors, etc.
Luciano Chessa is a composer, audiovisual and performance artist, music historian.
Chessa's compositions include ‘A Heavenly Act’, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with original video by Kalup Linzy; ‘Piombo’, a piece for 2bows cello written for Frances-Marie Uitti and commissioned by NYC’s MAGAZZINO Italian Art, and the opera ‘Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago’, a work merging experimental theater with reality TV which required from the cast over 55 hours of fasting, commissioned by the Festival TRANSART and MUSEION, Bolzano’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition ‘Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe’. Chessa’s work appeared more than once in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze; and has been featured in the Italian issue of Marie Claire and in the September issue of Vogue Italia. He has collaborated with artists of the likes of Mike Kelley, Kalup Linzy, Ugo Rondinone, Chris Newman and Tarik Kiswanson; presented his works in such museums as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, SFMOMA, MONA in Tasmania, and the MART in Rovereto; and has been artist in residence at Civitella Ranieri, Lucas Artists Residency in Villa Montalvo Djerassy Residency Artist Program, the Art Gallery and Vanganga in Avarua, Rarotonga (Cook Islands).
Currently, Chessa is artist in residence at Monaco’s Direction des Affairs Culturelles to create a new installation for ArtMonte-Carlo (July 2024) and a new performance produced by the Théâtre Princesse Grace in collaboration with the Automobile Club de Monaco, the Pavillion Bosio, the Médiathèque de Monaco and the Music Academy Ranier III (September 2024).
Chessa is also a music historian specializing in 20th-century Italian and 21st-century American repertoire. He is the author of ‘Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult’ (2012), the first book dedicated to Russolo shift from Painting to his ‘Art of Noise’. In 2009, his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) was hailed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times as one of the best art events of the year; Chessa has conducted this project across the USA and internationally to sold out houses including Rockefeller Center in New York, RedCat in Los Angeles, the New World Center in Miami, Radial System / Maerzmusik-Berliner Festspiele, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, and Lisbon’s Municipal Theater. With this project he collaborated with the likes of Joan La Barbara, Mike Patton, Lee Ranaldo, Ellen Fullman, Blixa Bargeld, Pauline Oliveros, among others.
He has been interviewed twice by the British Broadcast Corporation, and has been the subject of two short documentaries: one produced by RAI World (2014), and the other by Vietnamese State TV VTV1 in the occasion of his first trip to Viet Nam (2015). Chessa's music has been published by Rai Trade, Carrara, and Neue Musik Verlag, and has been released by Sub Rosa, Stradivarius, etc. His record, ‘Canti felice’, issued by the Parisian label Skank Bloc Records, was August 2018 Record of the Month for one of Italy’s leading music magazines, Rumore. In October 2022, pianist Claudio Sanna released his music on the Swiss label Hat Hut as a prominent part of the anthology ‘Compositori Sardi Contemporanei’.
In the Winter 2018, while in residency at the Steel House in Rockland, ME to develop the audiovisual installation #00FF00 #FF00FF, he prepared for Schirmer the diplomatic edition of Julius Eastman's Symphony No. II, the world premiere of which he conducted at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The New York Times has described Chessa’s rendition as a work that “radiates Cosmic Grandeur”. His edition of this piece has been performed by both The New York Philharmonics and The Cleveland Orchestra 2022: in his NYTimes review Zachary Woolfe stated that this work “should become a staple” of the contemporary orchestral repertoire. His chapter on Eastman’s ‘Gay Guerrilla’ closes the book of the same title—the first ever dedicated to Eastman’s music.
www.lucianochessa.com