Lorenzo Galluccio
2024-02-07T12:00:01+01:00

Some events cannot be fully understood as they happen. Their understanding may come later. They are like black holes, gradually sucking in shreds of history, names, and events, preserving everything for the right moment: the entrance into a new dimension of culture. Costantino della Gherardesca recounts one of the most striking cases in this regard for "True Story": the Dissonanze Festival.
More

CULTURE 07.02.24

Eur-Hole Dissonanze

WRITTEN BY: COSTANTINO DELLA GHERARDESCA

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ZERO

Rome, 2017. I left London to return to Italy and find myself in a phase of auditory irritability: I reluctantly attend large festivals, especially those centered around electronic music, but Dissonanze is a different story. For me, a castaway from beyond the English Channel, it is comforting to see an old friend like Giorgio Mortari, who is the father and educator of the Roman festival, and to engage in a one-on-one conversation with his ever-open and fertile mind.

Unlike me, Giorgio is charismatic and not destitute, enabling him to connect with the younger generation. He helps the kids of Nero, then innocent like a teenage Bianca Jagger, to afford the New York-Fiumicino flight for the post-conceptualist Cory Arcangel: he is coming to Dissonanze to perform Bruce Springsteen covers on the xylophone. While I have just completed my studies, Giorgio serves as a testament that learning should continue even in (seemingly) non-academic contexts, and that a festival can be an opportunity to recreate – just like in a laboratory -interdisciplinary occasions and relationships, free from earthly obsessions such as current events, relevance, and immediacy.

Thus, among the first decades that usher in the new millennium, a wormhole opens up, like a black hole, absorbing all possible light to bend space-time. In one way or another, we all fall into it. Take the artist Cyprien Gaillard, who, between sets of operatic electronics, seeks me out to discuss fashion, or the extraordinary woman with many names with whom I establish a deep communion of spirits while seated at a yellow marble table. She belongs to an ancient English family (and by ancient, I do not mean noble, but rather delicate).

The lady, Alalia Chetwynd, a performance artist and painter, still calls herself Spartacus Chetwynd, and in 2013, she will abandon the name of the rebellious slave to rename herself Marvin Gaye Chetwynd. This genteel white lady assumes the identity of a historically homosexual African American man, killed by his own father with gunshots. From 2018 onward, she will be reborn as Monster Chetwynd because the monstrosity of the West is the only thing we can consider bearable, and through continuous observation, the monstrous becomes sublime, and vice versa.

One who understands this well is Peter Christopherson. To keep the more impressionable visitors away, Giorgio had signs placed outside the room. He knows that Christopherson will project unspeakable things. He is one of the founders of Throbbing Gristle: a beacon of avant-garde music that is about to enter the annals of contemporary art history. He arrives from his Bangkok, where he bought used mobile phones for a few baht. Inside, he found everything, photos and videos of all kinds, but his attention focused on the gruesome videos filmed by some Thai criminals. Away from the camera, violence is rapid, devoid of the virtuosities of high butchery. In front of the camera, violence becomes even more savage and theatrical. A hidden criminal shoots you in the head and disappears into the darkness. However, a criminal who knows he is being recorded wants to offer the lens (and therefore the viewers, posterity, and memory) an image worth capturing and emembering—a tangible and grotesque testament to their own cruelty. A bullet to the head is not enough; they must improvise creatively and reduce the poor victim to a tartare. These illuminating snuff movies play on the large screen behind Christopherson, while sounds from the future wash over the audience, and English critics (not surprisingly) storm out in indignation. The signs were not enough.

Thank you, Giorgio, for welcoming me upon my return to Italy and for illuminating Rome with Dissonanze: from Cluster to Kid606, from Salem to Karlheinz Stockhausen. You had taste, unlike us who are destitute. You were a pure architect, and your departure has left entire neighborhoods empty, areas that will never be reopened for construction or restoration. Creativity will no longer be institutionalized in cement mausoleums; it will no longer have anything to do with the economy of debt and credit that emerged in the early settled communities built upon the graves of their dead in the Indus Valley civilization. Creativity will be solely a gift, made up of memories like yours, and it will travel as a nomad, precarious, without buildings, without Triennials and Quadrennials.

SEE WHAT'S NEW