At 77 years old and with a CV that needs no introduction, Brian Eno returns to Italy. Musician, composer, producer (the one behind David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and U2's best albums, just to name a few) as well as one of the most influential visual artists of the last fifty years, Eno has chosen Parma for his widespread project that intertwines generative music, light installations and urban regeneration. A more than welcome return of the father of ambient music and pioneer of glam rock and electronics, four years after his latest Italian creation – the “Brian Eno x Trentino” project – and after the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement awarded to him by the Venice Biennale in 2023.
There are two venues for the widespread project which, for the occasion, will be returned to citizens after a long time. Brian Eno's installations will be open to visitors from April 30th to August 2nd.
Al San Paolo complex – defined Eno as “a magical and secret place” – will come to life SEEDa two-phase project that focuses on listening and the relationship with space. In the Gardens, Eno presents “Installation for Giardini di San Paolo”, a site-specific audio work created together with the Turkish writer and journalist Ece Temelkuran: a landscape of generative music spread over 8,000 square meters, in continuous transformation. There is no identical piece to another: visitors, moving freely, will compose their own sound experience. At the end of the exhibition, the work will find a new location at the Casa del Suono, while the experience lived in the Gardens will be recorded in a single vinyl, recorded by Eno himself and destined for the city's permanent collection.
Imposing and monumental, the spaces of the CruiseOld Hospital they host instead My Light Yearsthe largest collection ever made of Eno's audiovisual installations, from the 1970s to the 2020s. Here light becomes matter and time expands: historical works and recent works dialogue in a path that requires slowness and attention from the viewer. Among the key works it stands out 77 Million Paintings (2006), defined by the artist as “visual music”, an infinite flow of combinations of images and sounds that are never repeated the same. Next to this, Face to Face (2022) explores identity in the digital age: from eighteen photographic portraits, a software generates over 170,000 faces in continuous metamorphosis, figures that have never existed but which appear surprisingly plausible. A “huge building” Eno himself defined it, saying that it was not easy to occupy the spaces and manage the installations, but it was a job that the artist himself defined as “stimulating”.
The installations have been exhibited in museums and public spaces around the world and reflect his idea of art as an evolving process, rather than a static object. Also in this area, Eno confirms himself as an “architect of atmospheres”, capable of blending technology and artistic sensitivity. Start of module
Here is how the artist explains the Parma project: “My feeling is that making art can be more usefully thought of as gardening: you plant some seeds and then start to observe what happens between them, how they come to life and how they interact. This approach is sometimes called “procedural.” I call it “generative”. Just as a garden is different every year, a piece of generative art might also be different every time you see or hear it. The implication is that such a work is never truly finished, there is never an end state”.
At the Gardens of San Paolo I will create a new work designed specifically for this place. It will fill the entire space, which is very suggestive and represents a sort of secret place, closed for many years and today finally revealed.” On the collection that will be exhibited at the Ospedale Vecchio, Eno adds: “It really thrilled me. It is an immense building and it was a real challenge to understand how to distribute the works in such a large space. Some are contemporary, but most are older and include some of the very first light installations I made in the 1970s. It will be a rather varied show and will require the audience to walk a lot.”
In the presentation press conference organized by Municipality of Parmapromoter of the initiative, the Deputy Mayor and Councilor for Culture and Tourism of the Municipality of Parma, Lorenzo Lavagettoand the producer and curator Alessandro Albertinithey told of a project that had a long gestation, which was stratified through difficulties that translated into pluses and made it grow. The two projects intertwine contemporary art and the valorization of historical heritage, supported by a network of institutional collaborations. But above all they reaffirm Eno's idea of art as a “generative” process: a garden in which seeds are planted and what happens is observed. In Parma, those seeds become sound and light, inviting the public to an experience that is different, unrepeatable, deeply immersive each time.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
