Project Room #8 | Roberto Pugliese. Concerto per Architettura

From September 19, the Foundation welcomes the solo exhibition of Roberto Pugliese (Naples, 1982), Concerto per Architettura, the second appointment in the Project Room 2018 series, curated by Flavio Arensi, who developed a three-act project, La stanza di Proust, a pretext to observe the events of society and humanity through sounds, absences, and presences, of both past and future.

After Donato Piccolo’s solo exhibition, the second act of La stanza di Proust features the Neapolitan artist Roberto Pugliese, who conceived Concerto per Architettura, an audio composition created specifically for the Project Room space. The architectural floor plans were used to reinterpret certain numerical values, which were then assigned to a series of genetic algorithms and complex functions. Thanks to an acoustic-mathematical relationship, these processes generated sound material that was subsequently reworked by Pugliese.

The result is a sound sculpture that spreads throughout the Foundation’s spaces, making the most of the architectural resonances to give the space its own “voice.” This true Concerto per Architettura will be performed by Roberto Pugliese on the evening of the opening, and then played throughout the duration of the exhibition. Accompanying the artist will be Pietro Lama (1988), a young sound designer and video artist, as well as a former student of Pugliese, who will create a custom projection in harmony with the music.

This kind of musical interlude between the first and last act – says Flavio Arensi – also marks the culmination of a research that makes sculpture a new linguistic system, where space and sound become intrinsic values of the artwork. The theme of sculpture, therefore, goes beyond the simple scheme of light-space-matter to enter a new semiotic method where the object is joined by sound. While with Piccolo the observer was called to engage with machine-sculptures that learned to manage themselves through interaction with humans, with Pugliese we come to confront the vibrational/frequency nature of matter. With a minimal and rigorous installation, Roberto Pugliese’s work asks the visitor to participate with the space in the musical system; after all, the great Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache could not separate the listening of a musical piece from the human and experiential dynamics of the theater audience.