VOCATION
solo suono

RAM, via Conte Verde 15, Rome
Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny, France
De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Holland
Mestna Galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia

from 18th February to 20th March 2010

OPENING: 18TH February H. 19



text by Federica Bueti

exhibition partners: Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lorenzo Benedetti, Alenka Gregorič

RAM radioartemobile is proud to present VOCATION/only sound, curated by Federica Bueti with sound installations by Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Köner and Liliana Moro.
VOCATION is an investigation of sound as an emotive material, dynamic material of reality, a physical short circuit that precedes the moment of theoretical reflection.
The works by the three artists reflect in their approach the emotive, involving and seductive dimension of the sonar event, underlining the liberating potential of those practices which make the proximity with the user and the friction between body and space an important imaginative vehicle. For this reason, VOCATION, through the three sonar interventions, invites us to reconsider the importance of the physics of reality.
Each of the sound installations will be simultaneously hosted in three different museums that have supported the idea of creating a collaborative event, a geographical expansion of the project hosted in Rome. Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lorenzo Benedetti and Alenka Gregorič have collaborated in partnership with the Rome event.

The sound installation by Thomas Köner will be hosted by De Vleeshal, Middelburg Holland
The sound installation by Liliana Moro will be hosted by the Mestna Galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia
The sound installation by Brandon LaBelle will be hosted by the CAC Brétigny, France

Look around, nothing has changed: the walls have not blown away and the light continues
undeterred to pay its respects to the volume of this tired architecture, history repeating itself.
History is accumulated within spaces in an effort to extend itself in time; it exhausts itself and
regenerates itself in a process that makes repetition one of the few actions still permitted to
nature.
On the other hand, cyclicity is an event in which the object is substituted by a non-object and in
turn superseded by a new presence: this is the true dimension of reality; a continuous exchange,
a necessary and inevitable substitution from which there is no turning back, progression the only
option, the junction of two lines on the same sheet, the fight between meanings of the same line.
In this infinite battle it becomes indispensable to negotiate an alternative vision of reality:
superimposing without ever crushing, existing without ever obstructing.
Fluctuation is what we seek. The incomprehensible apparent is what we receive; a mixture of
sensations and thoughts which cross over and contradict each other searching for a foothold in
history which is stable, inviolable, almost necessary. Voices come one after the other, tied
together by a withering cotton thread, the timbre of memory pushes Liliana Moro towards
repetition as a possibility for every story to be re affirmed in perhaps its finest version. However,
our mood today is compressed in that desert zone without an exit: the mathematical calculation
has given us back a monster which staggers between an absolute with no nuances and a
relative which is too weak to resist being weathered.
We are still in the era of ruins, resigned to our destiny as guardians, unsuspected imprudish
gentlemen, enthusiastic souls facing a repeating endless loop.
Breathlessly we dig through the rubble of a civilization that we do not wish to abandon, afraid,
perhaps, of the void, as if it were already no longer ours.
The void (absence, silence) that is knowingly sought is reflection, a majestic exit for the fetishism
of the object, for every type of pre-constituted hierarchy: intense is the desire to retrieve a reality
that has for some time been abandoned.
Sound is like a void the instant it annuls the difference between surfaces, it insinuates itself
between the pleats of and takes hold of the body violently. What we strive for is to provoke the
necessary friction so an alternative to reality can be realised; a reality in which imagining is not
only projection, but also, and above all, action; aesthetics and ethics simultaneously. The sound
mapping of physical movement like in The Sonic Bodies by Brandon LaBelle, urges us to think
about every silence, every breath, every step as being interconnected by an infallible system of
natural reciprocity. It is impossible to ignore the gravitational system.
The invisible, capillary and diffused is a way to be able to live in the cracks that gape between
mighty architectures. There is no more cement with which to fill in the gaps created by
indifference. There are no more excuses for the unaware. We want to be everywhere, present at
our own destiny and supporters of a new change.
We are accustomed to occupying the interstice while the ruins of altermodernity represent little
more than shelter for a new form of emancipation: that of predetermined spaces, the quest for a
more suitable geometry to inhabit.
It is then that we can cross each defined, stable threshold. We cross that thin line, as does
Thomas Köner. He amplifies moments of long suspension, alternating the void with the apex of
each powerful vibration.
Everywhere sound searches for mimicry with space, not as reassurance, it works hard to create
the conditions in which to rethink a radical spatial transformation.
The ecstasy of letting oneself be astonished brings possibility, both manifold and endless.
Federica Bueti