16 September – 26 October 2019, AlbumArte, Rome
Reflecting Women focuses on the concept of female identity. The title itself indicates a reflection on gender, a genre generally established through the stylization of the body. Reflecting expresses not only the analysis of the female figure, but also a reflection understood as a perception that each of us has through the observation of others. In fact, nobody can observe herself/ himself, except in a mirror, but a mirror can also show a distorted image, like the one that every woman receives and absorbs from the female iconography of contemporary society.
The project was promoted by the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Italy and implemented thanks to the support of the Lithuanian Council for Culture, i-Portunus (a project selected and supported by the Creative Europe Programme) and the Lithuanian Culture Institute.
12 October 2019, MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome
Kristina Inčiūraitė presents a laconically expressed musical performance ‘The Fragment as a Proverb’, together with a few members of the choir of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, with its long tradition of singing, and Mariko Takagi, a whistling virtuoso and a champion of several international whistling contests. This is a performative concert, conceptually extended by video projection. The significance of the voice, the analysis of personal and collective memory reveals in this musical event, where various popular tunes performed in subtle manner.
Reflecting on the state of contemporary culture, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler expands Gilles Deleuze’s idea of ‘control societies’, and points out that aesthetics has become a powerful weapon in economic warfare. Today’s audio-visual technologies, like an instrument of capitalist marketing, control and shape the choices made by society. The philosopher highlights the intense production of temporal industrial objects (like a song or a film that continues in the time of its flow, and coincides with the time of our consciousness), which draw many people under its control, simultaneously listening to the same tune or watching the same film. These are unified experiences, in which a certain ‘symbolic misery’ comes through: our choices and our individual desires are reduced.
In our technologised culture, song recordings have become widespread, and by being constantly repeated, they have become part of our memory. Agnès Jaoui, the screenwriter of Alain Resnais’ film ‘On Connait les Chansons’ (1997), once said that by gathering popular songs for film, she used fragments of songs like proverbs. According to her, the commonplaces rooted in the words of popular songs summarise feelings, and at the same time they impoverish them. By using a reduced form of song, whistling or humming, and by supplementing tunes with moving images, these problems of ‘impoverished’ experiences come into focus in the project ‘The Fragment as a Proverb’.
The performance will be held at the Architecture Archives Centre of MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts, on the occasion of The Day of Contemporary Art and will be attended by the whistling virtuoso Mariko Takagi, the Master of Choir Massimiliano Torsini and the Choir of the National Academy of S. Cecilia.
