Exhibition

OPENING – 22 JUNE 2017

For the second chapter of The Institute, artist Alex Cecchetti exhibits Cetaceans a polyphonic concerto for a choir, a glass harmonica and a waterphone, exploring dreams, dizziness, time lapses and lucid dreams, as states in which a different form of interaction is produced.

Speculating on future ways of communication without the use of spoken language, Cetaceans is an immersive installation soliciting participants’ senses with the use of multiple sound sources. The music partition is in fact a hybrid composition in which music notation, poems and patterns of whale voices have been arranged together, intertwined, mixed and merged. A choir of singers reproduces the sound of whales and mixes these non-human voices with the music and Alex Cecchetti’s poems and reflexions. Immersed into an atmosphere producing a feeling of disembodiment, eventually, spectators will fall asleep, and the concert will be experienced only in their dreams.

In times where figures such as the workaholic, the game-addicted, the social-networks obsessed, the telephone addicted and the cyberspace time-waster represent common life conditions in which states of sleep-deprivation affect normal capacities of interrelations, Cecchetti has long researched non-human and unconventional forms of communication based on music and dreams. What happens if in the future humans will communicate only by using abstract sounds? And what if we will be operating only in a constant dream state? Alex Cecchetti invites the audience to think about future forms of communication models, by enjoying an experience that can only be appreciated when falling asleep.

Workshop

Along with the exhibition, the artist will conduct a workshop titled THE FUTURE IS A SECRET SOCIETY together with artist Lina Lapelyte. Starting from the assumption that a secret society has moved away from the use of spoken language for communication purposes, the participants will be asked to identify themselves with this future condition, experimenting three different ways of abstract interrelation: poetry, music and tarot. The city of Turin will be functioning as the test bed to experiment these new ways of communication into the real world.

Biography

Alex Cecchetti is an artist, a poet and a choreographer. Difficult to classify, his work can be considered as the art of the un-representable: tactile and poetic, aesthetic and materialistic, it creates mental and physical environments in which the spectators are often part of the work. Invited to walk backwards into a garden or to sleep at the sound of a choir singing in the deep of the ocean, or taking dance class from stones and staircases, the spectators are no longer defined to the role of the beholder. Cecchetti has exhibited internationally having solo exhibitions at Kunstraum, London, 2015, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania, 2012 and Jue de Paume, Paris, 2011 and solo performances at Serpentine Galleries, London, 2015, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2014, MAXXI museum, Rome, 2012. He performed in important festival as Playground Leuven and Parade For Fiac Paris in 2016, Un Nouveau Festival, Pompidou, Paris 2014, The Museum As Performance, Serralves, Porto 2015, TBA Portland 2012. Recently the Palais de Tokyo in Paris dedicated him a day of carte blanche. Next solo exhibitions CCA Ujazdowski Castle Warsaw (Poland) and Ferme du Buissons (France) in the fall of 2017.