In my life, music represents that moment where the air is tinged with something other than me.

At the root of your project for the Italian Pavilion is the idea of listening as a foundational element of a relationship (with oneself, others, nature and technology). As if one imagined that the creativity of art also became the agent of an epokè – of a necessary suspension of saying and doing to affirm first of all the supremacy of listening. What is your idea?
Listening catches you from behind – you can’t always decide whether to listen or not. This moderates the impulse towards omnipotence that reigns in the West. Listening is a parallel world full of experiences and opportunities. It’s a surprising world, if only we decide to practice it. In art there have been great artists like Pierre Schaeffer, R. Murray Schafer, Pauline Oliveros and today Georg Haskell who have pointed to places and to ways of listening. My work sets hearing on the same level as sight: I clearly put them on the same level, giving body to sound and dematerialising bodies.

What does music represent for you and your art?
In my life, music represents that moment where the air is tinged with something other than me. Where I’m in my own world, but I no longer recognise it. It’s the cheapest journey I’ve ever taken. Music is transportation, it travels through the air, through the body, and manages to open up another way of relating to others and to the world.

The three musicians involved in his project are each different from the other, but share an experimental yet minimalist, immersive and emotional approach to composition and performance. Can you tell us why Caterina Barbieri, Kali Malone and Gavin Bryars were chosen?
For various reasons, which later revealed many affinities. Gavin Bryars has been an important reference point for me since I finished school. You can remain inside Gavin’s music, there is always a place to breathe in it. He is a master and a new old friend. Kali Malone and Caterina Barbieri instead are a shared invitation with Luca Cerizza. In Kali’s music, suspended, fragile paths of listening appear, perceived as mirages and produced by the harmonics of a texture conceived as a viaticum. I also find this in Caterina’s work, the difference being simply that the formation of this suspended world is not analog but electronic, and occurs at an atomic level, on another scale.

Listening requires a beginning and an end, an exit from and a return to silence. Since John Cage’s score for 4’33’’ seventy years ago, silence has become a force to strive for but one which is almost impossible to achieve. What is the meaning of silence for you today?
I believe that every day forever, across the entire world, there should be an hour of total silence. Silence should be taught in school. Silence is school. Silence is empathy.

The only figurative concession of your project is the statue which we find at the entrance of the Pavilion dedicated to the Buddha Bodhisattva. What is the meaning of this presence, which is foreign to Western culture, except for in the work of great thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche?
It’s not really that foreign, it’s just called different things. The Bodhisattva is a master who renounces enlightenment to help others find the way. There are many figures like this in the West too, for example Jesus… even though in the monotheistic regime this figure, by its very nature, becomes less graceful and always anxious to do something. This Bodhisattva, on the other hand, does nothing. He thinks. He doesn’t act. Not acting corresponds in the world of sensations to silence in the world of listening. The silence of movement. I think that with his posture alone, the Thinking Bodhisattva tells us the most important thing of all…

Featured image: Massimo Bartolini – Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia – Photo Andrea Avezzù