Milan, Italy

Does Audiovisiva succeed in it mission to transform the space of the city with sound?

In their press material, the organizers of the Audiovisiva festival have almost absurdly high hopes: “to penetrate the urban tissue, flow through the streets and the squares, take museums, antique buildings, private villas and underground garages as its milestones while turning the city into one wide stage.”

With poetical bombast, one can’t help but think their ideas sounds alright. At least we think. What does it mean to turn the city into a stage, is it making the city into another area of performance?, or will the music when ubiquitous lose it’s speciality: become muzak, background noise, merely another distraction? Why can’t the city just be a city? Or on the other hand, this could be magical, the whole city turning itself into a place of experimentation, giving the polis a necessary sound bath.

Lately music festivals, either thinking that loud house music ain’t going to cover it anymore or with more utopian designs than their promoter predecessors have taken to adding electronic arts or panels to sex up their carnivals with some intellectual credentials.

In enacting their mission statement, the organizers of Audiovisiva have not only taken over all the spaces they claim above, including empty walls along streets for projections, but sometimes music and video art can be transformative for the viewer and its context, and sometimes it can just be a video on a wall. Go to Audiovisiva and find what and wehre is this festival is and how it’s successful or unsuccessful at achieving it’s aim of transforming the city through sound.

Mission Report

Audiovisiva presents itself as an event which shows the different ways the emergent artists use diverse media to express themselves, from live performances to video-art.
Martina explained it to us. Audiovisiva's aim is to bring back to life – through art – the city, and to open the urban tissue to visions, maybe new ones, which could enrich the collective imaginary.
To show the work, Audiovisiva chose really typical public places: Museo Diocesano, Colonne di S. Lorenzo, Basilica di S. Eustorgio. The Warehouses of Porta Genova were maybe less meaningful as a public space, but definitely more accessible. The crowd was sparse, perhaps because of the rain, or maybe because of the Uovo Festival, which was taking place at the same time.
We asked Martina about her idea of noise as a pre-established rhythm, and if music can overturn this order, but her answer wasn't subversive at all. What Audiovisiva wants is that "people" come together, attracted by the pieces of art in the places they chose.
Then, for what concerns the idea of re-appropriation of public spaces on the part of the event's curators, it's obvious that it's not going to work if people have to pay to enter the Warehouses, or if a beer costs 4 euros!
In your script, you suggested to "dance if the spirit takes you": without an avant-garde and dissident poetics, these little events don't have the strength (and perhaps not even the "spirit") to create the right wavelength able to let people go with the flow...
Emanuele Andreoli, Roberta Peveri