La Volpe

This impossibly titled exhibition is not even an exhibition but a palimpsest made up of paintings, objects, moving structures,  sounds, sculptures and a variety of events and activities taking place throughout the month of April. Words, letters, languages and the human body, as well as gloves and Q-tips, rhinos and silkscreen prints, are just some of the ingredients of  a combinatorial and musical game. 

The pangram appears as a symphony of letters, a dance of consonants and vowels flowing in the harmony of that funny  combinatorial system we call the alphabet. Like an enchanting magician, the writer of a heteroliteral pangram captures  each letter once and only once, to compose a complete and accomplished sentence. Playing all the keys of the piano but  with a single touch: here is the savory and skillful art of combination. Linguistic enigma, precision of the limit, combinatorial  labyrinth, abyss of graphemes, score without repetition or duplication, gateway to the hidden dimensions of the universe of  signs, symbols, drawing and writing. Because then, to tell the truth, writing is different from speaking, and drawing a letter  turns it into an image or a sign or a symbol-imagine what happens when we start painting it. So what did a medieval scribe  actually do when copying a holy book? Did he write, paint, draw? Good question, John Lawrence Luke and Valentina answer in their own way, with their scrabble of letters gone mad, arranging them like cheerleaders with liturgical catafalques,  portraying them with Gothic splendor, belching them with the voice of the last white rhinoceros that was. Glossolalia carries  us away, cutting the air with ceremonial knives. And so: Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx. Jinxed wizards pluck ivy  from the big quilt. Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. Here, in Milan, @brigantinos. 

This is an exhibition by Luca Trevisani, Lorenzo D’Anteo, and Edizioni Brigantino, crossed by Michele Galluzzo, Michela De Mattei, Francesca Flora, Alessandro Bosetti, and Renato Grieco.

Michele Galluzzo is a graphic designer and researcher. After a bachelor’s degree in Communication Sciences from the  University of Salento and a master’s degree from ISIA Urbino, in 2018 he completed a doctorate in Design Sciences at  the Iuav University of Venice. From 2014 to 2017 he was a research assistant and graphic designer at the AIAP Graphic  Design Historical Archive in Milan. Since 2018 he has been part of the editorial staff of the international graphic design magazine Progetto Grafico. Since fall 2019 he has been curating the Instagram page @logo_irl and in 2020 founded—together with Franziska Weitgruber—the design/research duo Fantasia Type. Since October 2020 he is RTD at UniBZ  in Bolzano/Bozen. 

Michela De Mattei is currently based in Milan. She works across different formats and media, developing fictional  scenarios and unusual ecosystems in which animal-human affairs are often hijacked by technologies to question stan dards of authority and control, while addressing issues of animal agency and the changing dynamics of communication  systems. Recent exhibitions include: Retrofuturo, MACRO Rome (2024); Dive-In, Porto Design Biennale, Porto (2023);  Performative 02, MAXXI L’Aquila (2022); Aquaria – The illusion of a boxed sea, curated by Angela Rui, MAAT museum,  Lisbon (2021); Hypermaremma, Terme di Vulci (2021); The Dreamfish, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (2019); Blushing, solo  show at Belmacz, London (2019); The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, Part 1: Language, curated by Filipa Ra mos and Lucia Pietroiusti, Serpentines Galleries/ZSL London Zoo (2018); Estée Lauder series, Italian Cultural Institute,  London (2018); Inscape Rooms, Istituto Svizzero, Roma (2017). 

Francesca Flora is a writer and performer deploying poetic language through her voice—and its machinic alterations—to  explore the affective and semiotic potentialities of poetic language, in relation to political dynamics embedded in the everyday.

Part 1-3: Music from Portraits de voix by Alessandro Bosetti with Neuevocalsolisten Stuttgart (Johanna Vargas, Truike van der Poel, Martin Nagy, Guillermo Anzorena, Andreas Fischer). Released by Kohlhaas records.
Part 2: Plane/Talea with audience participation.

Alessandro Bosetti, born in Milan and living in Marseille, is a composer and sound artist with a particular interest in the  musicality of language and in the voice, conceived as an autonomous object and an instrument of expression. His works  enacts a dialogue among language, voice, and sound within complex tonal and formal constructions, often crossed by  oblique irony. Bosetti creates surprising pieces and devices questioning aesthetic categories and listening postures. 

Xong is the name of the collection produced by Xing, a vinyl-only record label of works by both Italian and international  personalities linked to the variegated worlds of live performativity. The collection explores a geography of artists who  present this sonic field as a platform to expand their staged worlds. “The space of the record” is given focus and ampli fies their poetics as both a sonic and physical phenomenon. Xong is a unique project that draws out divergent under standings of the performative and live arts, beyond genre and intersecting between different practices. Xong collects a  series of original creations that constitute an expanded program. Each physical record is a numbered edition on white  vinyl hosting the solidification of the gesture. A wave upon wave, a series of “Music-Non-Music” to actualize both the  artists and listeners imagination. 

Kohlhaas is a label active since late 2013 that has developed an interest in sound research declined through a multitude  of styles, forms and languages. The catalog ranges from radical improvisation to electroacoustics, from sound poetry to  contemporary composition.

While in a hotel room in Zurich, with a fresh broken foot and a pout on my face, those scoundrels who are nobody other than Brigantino, called me all excited about having me doing a little something something. Being the good friends that they are, they know that we often read aloud in the house where I live down south. Without pretentiousness, ownership or talent. And in spite of themselves, they may have been caught up in this practice a few times. 

One reads aloud for the listener to take their eyes elsewhere. To let the reader’s voice move us away from the idea we had of the characters’ morphology; or perhaps for the opposite reason: for the words to insinuate their timbre into a friendly voice. A reading aloud to inhabit the space of the setting. Public this time.

We immediately knew that the text or texts to be selected would have to have something to do with the idea of disassembling.

I immediately knew it was time to share this text that has been with me for many years, which has been photocopied and distributed among friends all over the country because it became too rare long ago. A book as hard to find as it is to read out loud, in fact. It takes a lot of trick words and labyrinth phrases to throw the language off track and regain the real, you know?

“The Order of Things” is a compendium, or a palimpsest if you will, of the most varied objects observed in a world turned upside down, walked backwards, where science and truth are merged in the imagination and naiveté of a gaze, albeit one attentive to microscopic details. 

Jacque Brosse was a psychoanalyst, expert in botany and religions. “The Order of Things” is a mysterious atlas of irresistible charm, first published in 1958 with an introduction by Gaston Bachelard. 

This music was composed by me in the last weeks, while reading and re-reading again this gem.

Renato Grieco – kNN is a composer, musician from Naples, active in the field of musique concrète, acousmatic, sound art and radio-art. He is engaged on the themes of listening, recording, archiving, storytelling, voice and speech. He  questions space through production, recording, organization and dissemination of sounds. After starting out as a double  bass player, he ventured into composing music for fixed media, under the moniker kNN. Immersing himself in active  research, he experimented with the arrangement of one or more sound sources in a habitable context; he imagined  and designed objects or spaces for listening, both physical and virtual; he has spoken inside some objects; he listened  through other objects. His work has very little to do with the so-called ‘acoustic ecology’. He believes in absolute waste and carnival. He tries not to align with the hordes that place sound practices among scientific or purely theoretical  disciplines. He considers listening as a cognitive activity per se, affecting the intellect and the body with its semantics, humor and tragic nature.

10/4/24, 6–9pm 
Opening 

12/4/24, 7:30–9pm 
Talk by Michele Galluzzo w/ Rinoceronte Bianco 

14/4/24, 11:30am–3pm 
Book launch Brief Inventory of Animal Resistance, VOL.1 
by Michela De Mattei with a performance by Francesca Flora at 12:30am 

22/4/24, 7–9pm 
FasFari (LP) on Xong & Portraits de Voix (CD) on Kohlhaas records launch and live by Alessandro Bosetti
Sound reading of Renato Grieco