MedioValdarno.it · 17 May 2022
Artist Jacopo Baboni Schilingi invites Florentines to join his collective project by recounting dreams in a voice message as they walk through the Terzo Giardino. Contributions, collected anonymously, will be reworked into a sound and multimedia installation accessible at the Terzo Giardino and Murate Art District in early September.
Florence, 17 May 2022. MAD Murate Art District and artist Jacopo Baboni Schilingi invite Florentines to give their dreams to the city. Il Respiro dei sogni is the title of the project in which, on 24, 25 and 26 May, from 10 a.m. to noon and 5.30 to 7.30 p.m., the artist and the MAD team will receive—in the literal sense—the dreams of those willing to “donate” them at the Terzo Giardino, a green lung beside the Arno accessed from Lungarno Serristori.
They will gather and rework the dreams in the large installation of the same name, to be presented in early September 2022 in the Terzo Giardino and at MAD, the municipal space managed by MUS.E. Curated by Renata Summo O’Connell and MAD artistic director Valentina Gensini, the project is funded by ANCI, the Presidency of the Council of Ministers’ Department for Youth Policies and Universal Civil Service, and Fondazione CR Firenze within LUMEN–Progetto RIVA. It is conceived and produced by MAD with Artegiro Contemporary Art, the Institut français, Florence’s Academy of Fine Arts and the Luigi Cherubini Conservatoire. Thanks go to the Consorzio di Bonifica Medio Valdarno for its decisive contribution to maintaining the Terzo Giardino.
Image: an aerial view of the Terzo Giardino.
“A collective installation made of dreams, under the guidance of a contemporary artist of the highest calibre,” deputy mayor Alessia Bettini declared. “A wonderful cultural experiment confirming MAD as an avant-garde space where experimentation and innovative ideas are born and take shape. It is also wonderful that the Terzo Giardino takes centre stage, allowing us to describe and demonstrate the river’s central role in city life.”
“The project Jacopo Baboni Schilingi conceived for Florence and the banks of the Arno comes after months spent working within our community,” explains MAD artistic director Valentina Gensini. “In particular, Academy of Fine Arts students led by Gaia Bindi have worked alongside the artist for months. We like to think the three days of dream collection will create a new magical moment in the city, in which residents of every age and background can contribute to a major collective work by sharing—completely anonymously—their dreams, their future-oriented imagination and the utopias we wish to nurture together.
“The original compositions the artist dedicates to each account will form a site-specific polyphonic work that will remain in our city as a pledge and indelible sign of a profound, multifaceted friendship. Jacopo Baboni Schilingi has cultivated it with a close, passionate community of young people, sharing thoughts, theories, staged actions, performances and a long, generous period of research.”
Dreams conceived at night, unfulfilled dreams or personal and collective utopias, hopes for the planet or future: Baboni Schilingi will gather each of these suggestions and transform them into the voices of one large installation.
An internationally acclaimed artist undertaking a long residency at MAD, Baboni Schilingi invites people, in this first “dream collection” phase, to walk freely through the Terzo Giardino for up to ten minutes, recording one or more dreams on their phone as voice messages to “give” to Florence.
Each message will then be interpreted by an actress recording all the women’s contributions and an actor voicing the men’s dreams, protecting the anonymity of those who donated their reflections. Each participant will also wear the Argo sensor on their chest. It records the heartbeat and measures breathing; these physiological data will likewise be integrated into the work and the sound score composed and dedicated to each dream.
In the final double installation, the public can listen again to all the dreams, accompanied by videos made by the artist and music composed by Jacopo Baboni by integrating the accounts with breathing and heartbeats.
On Wednesday 18 May at 5.30 p.m., Jacopo Baboni Schilingi will give a public presentation of Il Respiro dei sogni and the Dream Collection at Murate Art District with Claudio Rocca, director of Florence’s Academy of Fine Arts, and Giovanni Pucciarmati, director of the Luigi Cherubini Conservatoire. On Thursday 19 May at 6 p.m., with the great American musician Nicholas Isherwood, he will present a voice and live-electronics recital at MAD, supported by the French Ministry of Culture and co-produced with IRCAM–Centre Pompidou, Saison Numérique–Montbéliard, CMMAS–Mexico City, Warsaw Autumn–Warsaw, Pamplona, Valencia, Concordia, Montreal and Washington. Admission is free; booking is appreciated.
Jacopo Baboni Schilingi comes from so-called “art” music, combining notation and interactivity. Among his generation’s most representative composers, he has been composer in residence at IRCAM for seven years, associate artist at the Saline Royale d’Arc-et-Senans for three years, curator of the worldwide annual PRISMA symposium since 2000, associate artist of the EMW Festival at Shanghai’s National Conservatory for four years, Visiting Professor at Harvard University in the United States and Visiting Professor at Wuhan Conservatory for three years.
His visual and musical productions appear in multidisciplinary-art venues combining images, video, architecture and audience interaction: Sanlitun Village in Beijing, UniCredit Pavilion in Milan, the Grand Palais in Paris, Nexus Hall in Tokyo, the Streaming Museum in New York and others. Work with Arman in the 2000s initiated a series of creations with Miguel Chevalier, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Alain Fleischer, Elias Crespin and Sarkis.
In 2015 he participated twice in the Venice Biennale, creating music for the Turkish Pavilion’s Respiro della voce and the closing-day concert in the Sala delle Armi. He has composed for major sponsors including Hermès and Samsung. From 2015 to 2018, Paris house Camille Fournet sponsored his ARGO installation, shown at the Grand Palais in Artists & Robots. From 2018 to 2020 Chanel sponsored a series of residencies, a concert devoted to his work and a solo exhibition in Tokyo.