Uncertain States Blurring Waters, Burning Needs. A conversational sound sculpture

In a time when community values are in danger, language itself becomes a fragile receptor of change. The way we speak to each other in daily interactions at home, at work, in the city, where we live or while travelling becomes a subtle mirror of what is silently at work in our communities. Sometimes parts of language escapes from us, while at other times we have to run away from it and find shelter whiting new meanings and expressions. We too often think of language as a perfect machine, a finite and unchanging set of rules, bound to apply over and over and forget its hybrid and composite nature, its capability of adjusting to new situations, absorbing new elements and proposing new models for cohabitation. Language is always koine - a community and multiplicity of languages - and it exists only as far as someone alive is speaking or thinking it. 

In this durational performance volunteers of very diverse backgrounds are invited to enact a linguistic sculpture that is constructed by a set of almost geometrical rules, which organize, modulate, and musically morph a seemingly casual and unprompted conversation. A prompter proposes models of interactions, break symmetries and playing with the ambiguity between speech and sound. Over a duration of five hours the participants find themselves inhabiting a simulated geography and polyphony of relations, free of using language as they please, and to talk about whatever they like within an alternative universe as if logical and physical laws regulating language. Spectators may find themselves observing casual and seemingly irrelevant conversations subtly develop into clusters of abstract vocals and absolutely normal exchanges, reformulating their logical coherence over and over. 

The piece follows a thread and develops techniques that have been experimented with in previous works of Bosetti, like A Collection of Smiles, Mask Mirror, The Pool and the Soup, Acqua Sfocata, and Utilità del Fuoco ed altre Risposte Concentriche. 

Alessandro Bosetti (Milano, Italy, 1973)  is a composer, performer and sound artist whose works delve on musicality of spoken language, utilizing misunderstandings, translations and interviews as compositional tools. His works for voice and electronics blur the line between electro acoustic composition, aural writing and performance. 
One of the most innovative radio artists of his generation he created a vast body of work of hybrid, award winning, text-sound and radio compositions for the main Radio's and Electro Acoustic Music studios in Europe as WDR, Deutschland Radio Kultur, Radio France, ABC Australia, ORF, GRM/Presences Electroniques.  
Current projects include the abstract polyphony dispositive Plane/Talea, The Notebooks based on Leos Janacek speech melodies archives, the monophonic extravaganzas Mini and Maxigolf with Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Trophies a powerful speech-loop trio with drummer Tony Buck and fretless guitarist Kenta Naga and Mask Mirror an instrument and software that reorganizes speech for musical purposes enacting a form of electronic ventriloquism.