22/06 – 31/07, 2017
OPENING, 22 JUNE 2017
Alex Cecchetti – Cetaceans

curated by
Ludovica Carbotta & Valerio Del Baglivo

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents The Institute of Things to Come, a temporary research centre on futurological scenarios proposing a series of four solo exhibitions and an educational program, from February to September 2017. The Institute of Things to Come is supported by the grant ORA! from Compagnia di San Paolo.

For the third chapter of The Institute, artist Alex Cecchetti exhibits Cetaceans, a polyphonic concerto for a choir, a glass harmonica and a waterphone, exploring dreams, dizziness, time lapses and lucid dreams, as states in which a different form of interaction is produced.

Speculating on future ways of communication without the use of spoken language, Cetaceans is an immersive installation soliciting participants’ senses with the use of multiple sound sources. The music partition is a hybrid composition in which music notation, poems and patterns of whale voices have been arranged together and merged. A choir of singers reproduces the sound of whales and mixes these non-human voices with the music and Alex Cecchetti’s poems and reflexions. Immersed into an atmosphere producing a feeling of disembodiment, eventually, spectators fall asleep, and the concert is experienced only in their dreams.

In times of sleep-deprivation where gaming and social-media dependency, workaholic syndromes and nomophobia influence our everyday capacities of interrelations, Cecchetti has long researched non-human and unconventional forms of communication based on music and dreams. What happens if in the future humans will communicate only by using abstract sounds? And what if we will be operating only in a constant dream state? Alex Cecchetti invites the audience to think about future forms of communication models, by enjoying an experience that can only be appreciated when falling asleep.

Along with the exhibition, the artist will conduct a workshop titled The future is a secret society together with artist Lina Lapelyte. Starting from the assumption that a secret society has moved away from the use of spoken language for communication purposes, the participants will be asked to identify themselves with this future condition, experimenting three different ways of abstract interrelation: poetry, music and tarot. The city of Turin will be functioning as the test bed to experiment these new ways of communication into the real world. Selected participants are: Stella Baraklianou, Daniela D’amore, Molly Di Grazia, Alessandro Mazzatorta, Inda Peralortega, Serena Porrati, Georgia René Worms,
Saverio Tonoli, Mislav Zugaj and Gaile Pranckunaite.