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ITALIA ANNO
ZERO
As in a still from a Rossellini film -- it is from today's ruins that
Italia anno zero is born.
Italia anno zero is a collaboration between Olga Neuwirth (composer/performer)
and Roberto Paci Dalò (composer/performer/director) based on investigations
into texts by Antonio Gramsci, Giacomo Leopardi, Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Italia is not only a post-fascist country, it is also a pre-fascist place.
Especially through texts by Leopardi is shown how the Italian DNA works.
Something which later has been called “fascism” is already
part of the Italian way of life. The piece also deals with the visible
signs of today´s fascist merchandising through the presentation
of some of the nazi-fascist products available everywhere in Italy nowadays.
Gramsci, Leopardi and Pasolini lived on the edges of society and without
having any power analized social/political structures of their time, which
are still true today.
Two composers/performers gather around an astonishing project: an investigation
of texts by such Italian authors as Gramsci, Leopardi and Pasolini organized
in a musical way and presented in a staged concert with a five member
group made out of clarinets, guitar, lectronics, sampler, and theremin
vox. Kind of a band where collaborative strategies build up a dense structure
out of words with multilanguage textures.
The music by Neuwirth and Paci Dalò deals with all parameters of
the work, and the score includes instructions about projections, sound,
text and music. The use of special software for realtime image processing
enables the visual aspects to be as dynamic as all the other elements
for this multimedia work.
Amongst samples, Mussolini's voice transformed into acoustical fragments
where we don’t understand anymore the meaning of the words but we
are left with the straight grain of the sound.
The 2 authors (playing theremin vox, clarinets, sampler, electronics)
are joined by 3 outstanding, boarder breaking musicians. There are no
live voices in the piece and the speaking voices are part of the film.
By means of video projections a concrete scenic space is created which
literally surrounds the performers. The stage has few simple elements
like tables and chairs especially designed to function with the projections
to evoke some of the original places of the authors of the texts: open
spaces related to the Marche region in Centre Italy (Leopardi), closed
spaces like a prison cell (Gramsci), a city like Rome (Pasolini). Mostly
of the work is filmed in Rome and the entire visual is in black &
white.
Parallel to the performance, a radio work is created and broadcasted by
ORF Kunstradio.
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