JACOPO MAZZONELLI
DOUBLE SILENCE
27.03 / 28.06.2010

Charlie “Bird” Parker, a renowned American saxophonist, is considered the founder of a particular style of jazz called bebop. Bird combined an entire generation of outstanding jazz players, in which the use and abuse of drugs rivaled the never-ending musical and improvisation fantasy indifference, because an interaction and a relation could be born through the touching gesture. The coroner who examined his body, believed Charlie Parker to be 53 years old. He was only 35.
Parker’s series is an hypothetical tomb, composed of vinyls recorded by Parker himself (Bird is not a Bird #2).
The vinyls’ deformation and their subsequent plasticization reflects some kind of operative violence that the artist performs on the object.
An object which stops playing, which is empty of its primary function, to become a plastic, sculpturesque, denatured and artificial element, which keeps in it only the memory of a real intention.
40.208 – Studi (Ferri) is a series of 16 blades of irons from the sixties to which the balances of the metronome (rebuilt in laser cut steal) have been attached.
The number 16 refers to the 16 levels of people’s financial status originally included in a video in which a simple metronome – with its shape that almost reminds of a monolith, a door or a pyramid – projected in a large scale, was so perfect in rhythming the moment, to become a disturbing element if de-contextualized from its primary function.
Hence the beats of lento, adagio, largo become the category of abject, poor, miserable, and the ones of animato, allegro, vivace are substituted by abounding, moneyed, rich, prosperous, etc. Each beat was positioned at a certain height representing the swing of the metronome.
The concept of measuring time with the metronome is correlated to playing music (the vinyl) subjected by the plastic-sculptural aspect which is enriched by the symbolic-esoteric aspect which is part of all the forms of arts (part of the Assemblaggi in a gentle and expressive way: the cross is not intended as a cultural element but as symbolic, abstract, as an archetypal shape which is broken down and then reassembled following a process similar to the one used on the vinyl), developing a display “circuit” which is systematic and representative of the artistic style of Jacopo Mazzonelli. The work, which titles the exhibition and fulfills its goals besides representing them, is a video composed of different elements which are completed by interacting between them, or rather between the dimension of water and of mute sound, and between the one of fiction and its solution subsequently revealed.
The work is created from a reflection over the nature of sound and its perception through the materiality of the human body. Therefore the pianist Glenn Gould is used here as a rhythmic element, as a performer able to vibrate his body in rhythm with the sound.
The selected videos always and only show the movement of his body and face while playing, without ever showing the hands playing on the key.
The water and the fish become an intermediary agent between the reality and the real fiction (the projection), but, at the same time, also an element of conceptual reflection of the propagation of the sound.
An additional element of research is that the work acts on two different reality-levels which interact amongst themselves: the dimension of the aquarium (really small) however acts in an empiric, tangible and tridimensional reality; and the dimension of the projection of this same reality through the reproduction of the video on a big screen, itself real as well, but bi-dimensional. Double Silence reflects and presents the sound in its secondary-alternative manifestations: hence the work is absolutely thought of as being privy of audio.

Text by Jacopo Mazzonelli







Biography

Jacopo Mazzonelli was born in Trento in 1983.
He obtained a degree in piano in 2003. He has studied in depth music composition and obtained a degree in contemporary music at the Accademia Internazionale TEMA, in Milano.
He carries out a research on short films by the artistic vanguards in silent movies, creating the music together with the piano player Marco Rinaudo. His research, throughout sculpting, installation and video, investigates the relation between audio perception and visual element.
His photographic research converged in 2006 with the two- men show Ask the Dusk (with P.Cavagna – Foyer, Centro S.Chiara - Trento, 2007).
Awarded at Video.it at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti (Torino, 2007), he has produced an installation for the Festival dell’ Economia (Trento, 2008). Again in 2008 he took part to Videoart Yearbook (Bologna, 2008), the final show Radar.01 at Museo Civico di Riva del Garda and he presents the performance Scena retrospettiva / Flashback at the International Prize of Performance.

Website: www.jacopomazzonelli.com







On Screening:
Double Silence (aquarium, 2 fishes, camcorder, CCTV, 2008)

Selected Films:
Playtime (Jacques Tati 1968)
Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (Federico Fellini 1976)
32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (Francois Girard 1993)


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Curated by Marco Nember
Developed in collaboration with
the Italian Institute of Culture in
Amsterdam between May 2009
and September 2013