Sussurra Luce: contemporary music performance art festival

Sussurra Luce - a contemporary music art performance festival curated by Francesco Cavaliere and Massimo Torrigiani for Spazio Murat in Bari, is a programme of 5 events, with 10 concerts and an installation, featuring artists working on the boundaries between electronics, words and voices. Salgemma tells you about the festival through a short interview with the curators.

Sussurra Luce: where does the title of this festival promoted by Spazio Murat and curated by you find its inspiration?

Francesco Cavaliere: It's a rhetorical figure, a synesthesia I think. I really like puns, I use them all the time in my work. A series of records based on audio-stories could only be called Sussurra Luce (Whispers Light), precisely because it is imagined by listening.

Sussurra Luce is also a record collection and a radio programme on Radio Raheem. What kind of research do you carry out and could you tell us about the works you publish? What media and what distribution does the production of these works have? Is there an audience and an attentive collector to be mentioned?

Massimo Torrigiani: People interested in music, in sound, in the spirals of sense and non-sense, are many. When we did broadcasts on Radio Raheem, many people responded. Our records are limited editions, between 250 and 500 copies, mostly vinyl, a form of pleasure. The first edition of the next record, the new work that Hanne Lippard presented in September at Spazio Murat, will be 30 copies only. An artist's edition. The first disc in the series is by Ginevra Bompiani, who reads four short stories from one of her books from the 1970s, with music by Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage, opening and closing the stories. A curiosity: this is the first time that Barbieri has written, performed and recorded music on the guitar, her first instrument, the one in which she graduated from the Bologna Conservatory. The second is a new work by Francesco, Zoomachia Disc 1. In Sussurra Luce sonic tales and poetry, Auto-Tune, the ASMR - the noises and whispers that stimulate the autonomous response of the sensory meridian, ventriloquism, animal languages, environmental and synthesis sounds, nostalgia and nothingness, the lack of legacy of Beckett, Bene, Berberian, B and B, meet and mingle. First comes the listening, then the explanations, if they must.

After these first two dates, did you perceive a significant and attentive audience? Are there any other Apulian realities/projects (even in the same city) or in southern Italy to mention, which are developing the same research?

Massimo Torrigiani: Not that I know of. But I have to look harder. I have done a lot in the past; little in recent years. I would like to involve the artists who work around here. For the first two events at Spazio Murat the seats were all filled. There were musicians, curators, critics, enthusiasts, the curious… and a few people standing. A hundred or so in all. A good debut, and I am sure we will grow. We would like to continue with Sussurra Luce, mixing music, performance, installations, participation. Carla Boregas' concert in September was one of her first solo concerts, after a lifetime of collaborations. It is important for us to expose artists and audiences to experiments, to works in progress, to undefined things and experiences. Working with Spazio Murat is a fairytale.la.

In addition to curating the festival, on the first date you presented your work Zoomachia Disc 1, a fable in music - available on LP. A tale of animals where humans do not exist, and features an ant-scrib, a spider-scrib, a grasshopper/cricket-prophet and bees from the "COOAX YESAT" hive* can you tell more about it to those who missed it?

Francesco Cavaliere: I see you have learnt the protagonists' names well! Good! Yes, it is an animal fairy tale about a world, that of the ant A-tta, which is about to be destroyed by calciferous gullies that are creeping into the soil of their world. These ants believe in the arrival of a prophet, the one who holds the secret to free them from this deadly stony invasion. Scribe A-tta and her helpers identify a ventriloquist Cricket as such. This, however, is eaten by a Praying Mantis and with him her secret..

Can you tell us more about the upcoming events scheduled at Spazio Murat for Sussurra Luce in October and December?

Massimo Torrigiani: I would just like to invite everyone to come and listen to Lolina on 31 October, with her Fast Fashion, and Patrizia Valduga, poet and performer without equal, with Roberto Paci Dalò, also an exceptional musician, on 16 December. Practical information is on the Spazio Murat website. They will be beautiful. By the way, and interesting as it may be, I am happy to be back doing something in Bari after a few years. Here in the 80s and 90s I saw and heard everything, from wine cellars to Petruzzelli, Piccinni, Kursal, clubs, art galleries, Time Zones, thanks to microscopic projects with a very short life. And I hardly knew what I was getting into. The Internet and social media have killed off the surprises a bit.