A modified vintage wallpaper-printing roller automatically moves on a wall thanks to an electric motor. It looks like it is leaving behind a pattern, but it also plays a fractured soundtrack thanks to a steel comb ingeniously installed under it that has transformed it into a music box. This is Anri Sala's latest installation, "All of a Tremble (Encounter I)" at the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
A major figure in the French and international art scene, Sala was born in Tirana, Albania, in 1974. He studied film and video in Paris in the '90s and then moved to Berlin.
Sala is more famous for his a sixteen-minute colour video "Dammi i colori" (Give me the colours, 2003), that looked at the power of art rescuing the traumatized capital of Albania and featuring a voice-over with the city's then mayor (and current Prime Minister) and leader of the project, painter Edi Rama, explaining his regeneration project to Sala.
In more recent years Sala created experimental and hybrid works exploring the transition from one form of art to another, combining different media, disciplines and passions such as film, performance, music and architecture.
At the Venice Art Biennale in 2013 Sala left his mark in the French Pavilion with his "Ravel Ravel" and "Unravel" video istallations. In the former two pianists were filmed playing two versions of Maurice Ravel's "Piano Concerto for the Left Hand", originally commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who lost his right arm during World War I, with solos scored at different tempos; in the second section of the project, entitled "Unravel", the disc jockey Chloé Thévenin tried to sync the two records.
Located in the Pavilion of Traditions in the Arsenale, a section dedicated to all those artists who explore past historical references and reinvent and reinterpret them, "All of a Tremble (Encounter 1)" looks at the sculptural and graphic properties of sound, to explore the relationship between a work and the architecture of a place. The cylinder creates indeed a correspondence with a visual medium, while inviting visitors to spend some of their precious time watching it (time is another theme in Sala's artworks and in this case the roller rotates at a very slow pace...).
Visitors willing to stop for a few minutes in front of the installation will realise Sala is hinting not just at the possibilities of sound and visual patterns: the artist is indeed also reminding us to explore an archeology of media and the history of mechanical reproduction, without forgetting about the modern dichotomy between the mechanical and the digital, and between the fast rhythms of our modern lives and the slow rhythms of more traditional forms of art.
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