Dal 4 al 31 marzo apre
all’Auditorium Parco
della Musica Roma il terzo
appuntamento con il suono

Sound Corner / 3

 -

Dario D’Aronco

1’’ after death, 2013

6’ 27’’

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Antonia Alampi in conversation with Dario D’Aronco.

Can you tell me about the title? I would imagine it conjures something that inspired you.

The title refers to the moment in which the body loses the sense of the passing of time, as usually understood through the space/time equation.

An instant will expand and grow infinite, and our body will expect nothing to come after it. 1’’ after death is an attempt to capture in sound the eternity we are all destined to experience. This eternity is enclosed within a second – a paradox. Emanuele Severino calls this instant “the advent of the earth that saves”, and the work has no doubt been influenced by this thought.

Being a loop, one might say that the work ends in silence. The sound gradually grows, comes to a standstill, grows further and then suddenly stops. It is as though it were deliberately brought to an end just before one could delve into it.

It gives the feeling of some potentially endless duration that is interrupted because of some temporal contingency.

It is always difficult to discuss “sound”. In his book The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross talks precisely of the hostility that has historically been shown towards it, even by the cultured public. He attributes this to the “physical” characteristics of sound itself, as a vibration that passes through air and is difficult to perceive or visualize, even though it concerns both body and mind. Ross also provides some “physiological” explanations. What is your relation with sound and how do you think it differs from music? How do you approach this in your work?

Music is collective, sound is individual. Paraphrasing Scelsi, one might say that sound can exist without music, but music cannot exist without sound; consequently, speaking of sound means speaking of original forms that come before meaning.

No doubt, creating sounds for me is like envisaging a sculpture, something three-dimensional. This is why I believe that sound in so-called visual art is interesting and can acquire different nuances from those it has in the sphere of music.

Generally with music our perception is  two-dimensional, since we will wait for a musician to play a given piece, and usually our fruition is unbroken. In art we have a loop effect that enables us to intermittently enjoy works, to come and go.

You previously described this work to me as an attempt to 'lend form' to something as little subjective as possible. I wonder how this may be achieved.

I seek to remove as much as possible in such a way as to leave what the work requires. It is interesting that it contains certain references without having to illustrate any subjectiveness, any particular point of view.

Do you think the work may be interpreted, or experienced, as something largely “irrational” (I am thinking here of The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac)?

I do not believe in the mind/body dichotomy. I believe that thought is the result of a bodily reaction. While I would need more time to explore the matter in depth, I can say that I am ultimately interested in authors who attempt to reject this dualistic attitude typical of Western culture. So let us try to envisage “rational” thought as something than may be engendered by “irrational” impulses.

Courtesy of the artist