Rudi Punzo - cicli sonori/sound cycles

MANIFESTO

RUDI PUNZO‘s ever-transforming SOUND CYCLES

Comparing different disciplines such as sculpture, sound and performing art - stressing a particular and personal focus on the recycling of discarded materials and shapes and the use of renewable energy sources – I intend to challenge the vision of sculpture as a 3D art by transforming the noise inherent in the kinetic momentum into sound. Contrary to the prevailing museum signs "do not touch" the Musical Sculptures involve synaestheticly more than just one sense: sight, touch and hearing.

Visitors of the exhibition are invited to rotate or move - with caution - a pedal, a crank mechanism, a handle, thus directly participating in the creative process: they will be rewarded, sometimes with the perception of a thin wail, some other time with a shrill sound.

This is an act playfully sought by the artist, who seems to fool technocracy itself, trying to render it something else, bringing to life a never expected musical purpose from those gears, and yet lying in them. The arcane and constitutive desire of human sensibility to manipulate the language of sounds moves the artist to produce a visionary reality, creating objects, flows and bodies [ namely his own body that interacts with the machines] that function as a production unit: the desire and its object are just one thing; they are the musical machine.

There are artists who design the use of the new, and artists who reconfigure the existing, I cast a heartfelt glance at scrap, giving scrap itself an aesthetic appearance and a musical life. These machines have a simple and yet relentless functioning. They are strange, intricate and childishly plain and show themselves as “desiring machines” of deleuzian memory.

These devices do not resound their structural need, rather their freedom of expression, hence a new way to understand and grasp them: becoming means of sonorous representations, they set free their spell and move away from the utilitaristic outlook that produced them, thus bursting into a further strong de-structuration act.

CICADAS

In recent times the “sound machines”, disguising themselves as CICADAS, started to capture light and transform it into movement, sounds, reflexes, light games, magic and cheerfulness. They turn out to be small photovoltaic robots that chirp as long as they are exposed to light, just as their natural homologous bodies would do.

Initially they are silent and still, then they become incessantly talkative and restless , thus leading visitors to abandon themselves to the hypnotic fascination of electromechanical insects in euphoric freedom, although they are caged, boxed and trained in a joyful jumble of dioramas and terrariums.

Inexhaustible creatures, Duchamp’s, Calder’s, Tinguely’s, Arman’s and Fogliati’s elder daughters, they turn out to be relentless percussionists when it comes to accompany the exhibitions with sound performances

The sound obsession of materials becomes the instigating cause of concerts, theatrical pieces or brief performances the guiding principle of which is an ironical glance that conjugates simplicity and technology, improvisation and planning.

These heteroclite elements are assembled looking for the memory of sounds that pertain to various materials, often rescued from oblivion, that are the essence of kinetic-sound sculptures

The sound machines are progressively varying from the acoustic universe towards new horizons, which become perceivable thanks to a sagacious use of electronics

At first visitors are lost in bewilderment, then it is pure joy of the senses

The music that stems from the “subtraction of technology from technics itself”, from the hybridization of art and technics, meets an aesthetics of sound that the would-be instruments not only give vent to, but vouch for, pushed as they are by their vis ludica

Whilst the bow grabs thrills from strings that are stretched within atypical, makeshift structures, there comes the invasion of charming self-propelled insects, until you get lost, dandled and puzzled by the incessant chirping of armless, tender, fleeting, swarming and irreverent insects, and at last enlightened by the discovery of endless worlds made of sounds, movements and sensations.