May, 7th | h.18.30 | Padiglione Conza

Fabio Battistetti

Into the Wood is an environment-themed electro-acoustic performance that uses wood as its main source of sound for the creation of sound textures, rhythms and melodies.

The resulting sound lays the foundations for building a new relationship between timber and humans: wood is a living material !

In 2009, I started to process the sounds that I’ve recorded in the forests during my walks in the mountains, and at the same time I started to analyze the acoustics of the wood found in the woods. After that my sound research focused on the use (for playing) of pieces of wood furniture or abandoned near the garbage cans. Our cities, our habits make us overlook many aspects concerning the environment and the primordial elements of life, like plants for example, so i developed “Into The Wood”, trying to recover the natural value of the wood trough a sound performance that uses the acoustic of wood trough an electronic procession of the sounds. Every time I’m holding a piece of wood or I am in a forest, I try to be aware of what I have in front of me and try to establish a relationship between the objects and my attitude in making music. In the 2010 I made some performative interventions in the woods of my country (North west of Italy): hugging tree or sound interventions using the trees, branches and trunks, in each of these occasions I felt comfortable.

Performance

Into the Wood is a forest of sound, where the acoustic properties of wood take on the semblance of electronic music and ritual music.

Sound is created in real time through the use of objects, wooden instruments (amplified by microphones and digitally adapted), and live nature recordings of mini ‘tree hugging’ performances and of forests themselves. The performance unfolds within a wooden cube, where the artist manipulates plywood boards, branches and tree bark to make sound, against a video backdrop screening the story of wood from a visual point of view. the cube is the centre of the action. inside, the artist has his console, from where he controls and manipulates sound. the back and side walls are dotted with wooden objects, held up by elastics and shelves.

The structure (the wooden cube) is the heart of the action, inside the artist plays the wood and manipulates the sound. The front and two side are full of objects held together by the elastics, the rear is dedicated to the visual projection. During the live show there’s also a projection showing the performances Eniac did playing in the woods with found pieces of wood.  The research behind the work, begun in 2009, and Fabio Battistetti’s involvement of set designers and visual artists (Catherine Chanoux, Silvia Poeta Paccati, Emanuele Andreoli, Serena Porrati and Federica Pace) combine to produce a natural microcosm for the performance, where the artist acts, and in doing so interacts physically with sound.