Video Opera Live, 50’
Teatro 2 and Galleria delle Vasche, Pelanda
Admission free while places last
Moonbird is a film by Rä di Martino with music by Mauro Remiddi in which the lead roles are played by actress and performer Silvia Calderoni as Moonburd and artist Manfredi Beninati as Amedeo.
In Moonbird Variations the images of the film are set in a live audio visual performance that combines the cinema, video art and opera. The audience will be part of a sound path, a labyrinth of echoes and beats that appear to come from beyond the grave, thanks to the use of the acusmonium, designed by musician Simone Pappalardo. That is where the story of Moonbird is built. In the centre of the sound path, the encounter with the characters occurs thanks to video screenings. The music, which is transformed from a neoclassical form into an electronic cloud (in which drum machines, manipulated voices and acoustic instruments will exist side by side) interacts with the screenings.
The images lead the audience into the story of Moonbird, a dreamlike creature who appears and breathes life into a villa in which a man has chosen to isolate himself from the world, a botanist who lives immersed in his objects, in the vast house that traps him and immobilises him. A banal event causes this setup to collapse and leads the main character out of his darkness made of convention and monotony. Here, in a state of dreamlike suspension, is where Moonbird is born. That which proved incapable of penetrating reality does so through the subconscious. The bird symbolises the message, whatever message it may be, personal, unique and unspeakable, it cannot succeed in penetrating man’s world.
Moonbird Variations by Rä di Martino and Mauro Remiddi was supported and produced during the 2021 edition of Prender-si cura, a project of artistic research and production residencies held in the spaces of La Pelanda.
Rä di Martino studied at the Chelsea College of Art and the Slade School of Art in London before living in New York from 2005 to 2010; she now lives and works in Rome. She has shown at such institutions as the Tate Modern in London, the MoMA PS1 in New York, Palazzo Grassi in Venice, GAM and Fondazione Sandretto Rebaudengo in Turin, MACRO and MAXXI in Rome, Museion in Bolzano, MCA in Chicago, Hangar Bicocca and PAC in Milan. She has taken part in such international fllm festivals as the Festival del film Locarno, VIPER Basel, Transmediale Berlin, Kasseler Dokfest, Torino Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival, winning the SIAE Award in 2014, the Gillo Pontecorvo Award and a special mention in the Nastri d’Argento with her film The PERFORMANCE MAS Go On (2014). Her first feature film Controfigura (2017) was pre-premiered at the last Venice Film Festival. In 2018/2019 she developed the project AFTERALL, with the support of the Mibac - Italian Council prize, which she presented at the Mattatoio - Palaexpo di Roma (2019) and in 2020 at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2020). In 2019 she produced a new video, L’eccezione, commissioned by the Museo Novecento in Florence which win the first edition of the Lio Capital prize (Milan, 2020). In 2021 she developed a documentary for ARTE’ entitled Il giardino che non c’è on Giorgio Bassini’s book Il giardino dei Finzi Contini and an experimental documentary on the Teatro di Pontedera Fuori dai teatri. In the summer of 2022 she is opening a one-woman show at the Forte Belvedere in Florence and a one-woman show devoted to the Carmelo Bene archive (Museo Castromediano di Lecce e Torre Matta, Otranto).
Mauro Remiddi, a Roman artist who began his main project, Porcelain Raft, with which he recorded two records for Americana Secretly Canadian (label of Bon Iver and Antony and the Johnsons) in New York in 2010.
After years of tours in Europe and America (also opening for bands such as Beach House, M83 and Blonde Redhead), Remiddi has recenly taken a pause from Porcelain Raft to devote his energy to the more experimental part of his music, his voice is still present but it becomes part of the electronic fabric and the song form crumbles here to make way for the unforeseen.
www.mauroremiddi.com
www.instagram.com/mauroremiddi
MOONBIRD VARIATIONS
with the live participation of:
Mauro Remiddi: voice, organ and modular synth
Simone Pappalardo: acusmonium, live electronics
Simone Alessandrini: electric guitar, sax
MOONBIRD IL FILM
Manfredi Beninati: Amedeo
Silvia Calderoni: Moonbird
director of photography: Simone D’arcangelo
editing: Rä di Martino / Benedetta Marchiori
produced by: Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bologna (MAMBO), Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, Mattatoio Roma | Progetto Prender-si cura
co-produced by: Fondazione Merz, Torino – Palermo, Snaporazverein, CH, La Triennale di Milano
our gratitude for their support also goes to: Galleria Valentina Bonomo, Rome and Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan