ANRI SALA

AS YOU GO

edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcella Beccaria

Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino

26 February – 23 June 2019

...UNTIL WE BELONG TOGETHER

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

“Through this parade, the exhibition as a whole becomes a musical instrument that relies on the visitors’ bearings to gain its full dimension ... until they belong together.”

Anri Sala

What lies at the core of Anri Sala’s practice? Is it his interest in sculpting his audiences’ experience of space through video and sound? His fascination with the balance between programmed and improvised actions in the work of committed musicians? His interest in the emotions produced by intervals and gaps, where forms of reparation from historical trauma may occur? One of the most intellectual artists in the field today, Anri Sala creates films and installations, as well as sculptural objects and drawings, that speak elegiacally both of the highest forms of Western culture, often the work of great musical composers and performers, and of the catastrophes of the human and non-human body — its limbs amputated, its hands severed.

Yet his works empathetically project an acute awareness of pain in ways that are never dramatically outspoken. Almost all his works refer directly or indirectly to forms of resistance to this amputation through craft—the making of things with expertise, precision, and dedication.

Anri Sala’s art investigates traumatic turning points or their aftermath in modern West European history and is deeply rooted in his situated experience as a diasporic Albanian born in Tirana, in 1974, who moved to France at the age of twentytwo in 1996 and has lived and worked in Berlin since 2004.

Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth century until it first became independent

in 1912 following the rise of late nineteenth-century movements of national independence in much of Europe. Albania was never part of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–1941) formed in the Balkans at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, yet it lies at the heart of what used to be called the Balkan peninsula — the European lands of the Ottoman Empire to the west of the Bosphorus Straits— the heart of advanced literature and culture for the Ottomans. Occupied by Italy just prior to World War II, after the war it became a communist state, the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania, until that collapsed in 1990, with the disintegration of the bloc of states that had been governed under the aegis of the Soviet Union. Anri Sala was fifteen when the Berlin wall came down in 1989. A binary Cold War world that had divided Europe began to shatter and along with it, all the norms and rules of Eastern European life. From 1945 until 1992, Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of six republics comprising Serbia (including Kosovo with a majority of ethnic Albanians), Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. During the ethnic wars in the 1990s opposing Serbia to these new independent former Yugoslavian states, Albania was nearby, close to the horror — fearfully close, yet not involved in the wars. Today, Albania borders on the Mediterranean Adriatic Sea to the West, Montenegro to the North (itself bordering with Bosnia and Herzegovina, capital Sarajevo), on Kosovo to the Northeast, Macedonia to the East, and Greece to the South. When socialist Albania collapsed in 1990, Anri Sala did not emigrate immediately, but rather attended the National Academy of Arts in Tirana from 1992 to 1996. While the previous socialist regime had enforced Social Realism and academic painting, the new liberal course allowed for young artists to express themselves through abstraction and encouraged the development of a personal style and touch — something that the young artist found just as canonical and forced as the previous aesthetic norms. Rather than indulge in such forms of extreme individualistic self-expression, he began to study the ancient art of fresco painting, a highly enduring technique of wall painting where pigment is not mixed with any binding but absorbed into the fresh, wet plaster of the surface of a wall and fi xed inside the wall itself as it dries. To work in fresco means to be extremely aware of time, since one must divide one’s work into giornate or “days,” preparing the fresh plaster area to be painted in one day only. If the plaster dries, the pigment will not be absorbed and the fi nal effect will be lost. The connection between one giornata and another is an essential part of the fresco artist’s process: never working with a straight line, which would make too visible a division, the artist places the fresh plaster in the sinuous shape that corresponds to the contours of the different forms to be painted. There is something time-based, sequential, architectural, structural, and musical in this form of wall painting, and its skills seem to have seeped deeply into the video-installations that Anri Sala would later create.

From late 1996 to 1998, he lived in France to study video at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, after which he attended the Postgraduate Studies in fi lm directing at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing. In 1997, he went home for a short time and there he created his fi rst memorable artwork, Intervista (Finding the Words). Completed a year later, it was a documentary narrative based on a piece of silent footage of his mother at a political rally in 1977 and interviewed on TV in 1979 at the age of thirty-three in communist Albania. He recorded her in the present, watching her younger self, unable to remember her own words. That year, 1997, was a year of strong social unrest in Albania caused by the collapse of a number of financial pyramid schemes, and the country was effectively in a civil war; after the death of 2,000 people, the government was toppled.

The work deals with the traumatic legacy of communist Albania. Anri Sala finds an old reel of film footage of his mother, Valdet Sala, as a young and committed communist woman standing next to the dictator Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Party of Labor of Albania (PPSh) from 1941 to 1985, as they attend a Labor Youth Union Congress in 1977. On the same reel, she is later seen being interviewed in 1979 by Albanian National Television. The found footage is mute, since at the time sound was recorded separately from image. Anri Sala’s artwork narrates his contemporary attempt to reconstruct his mother’s words with the help of children from a school for the deaf, as well as through a conversation with his mother as they watch the silent film together. In Intervista, he asks his mother, “How do you feel about only deaf-mutes reading into your past?” She replies, “It’s an irony of fate […] We were living in a deaf and dumb system where we only spoke with one mouth and one voice […] We thought we’d change the world, and little by little we lost everything. Our generation was the victim of past errors.” She continues, “I think we’ve passed on to you the ability to doubt. Because you must always question the truth.”

Anri Sala’s complex installations encourage his audiences to be alert and pay attention, to decode the structure of the artwork, to exercise and fine tune their interpretative abilities, to emancipate themselves from the passivity produced by our pro-science and pro-technology era of algorithms that progressively remove the interpretative capabilities of the human, and thus our decisional agency. In the filmic installation called AS YOU GO (2019), created specially for the spaces of the eighteenth-century Castello di Rivoli, for example, the artist folded three earlier artworks, the films Ravel Ravel (2013), Take Over (2017) and If and Only If (2018) into a new combined artwork. Like a large musical instrument, the display itself constituted not just a frame in which the work was viewed, but a meta-artwork, a moving sculpture, a perceptual device that became the actual subject of the work. Like components of an unusual orchestra, the three works are projected in the galleries, scrolling through the spaces of the museum. And playing music is what goes on in all three films, which respectively take their cues from: Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major (1929–30); two songs—La Marseillaise (1792) and The Internationale (1888); and Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola (1944).

Anri Sala, however, is interested in music not for its content but for its structure: how it sets up the encounter between the artwork and the audience in time; how it transforms an architecture of space into an architecture of time; and how it unfolds and articulates that encounter with the audience. To manifest this interest, he exaggerated the existing architecture of the Castello which is divided into five “gray cube” rooms just over 4 meters high and not covered by a ceiling. Like a giant architectural rendering that you could look at from above, the entire space lay below the overarching ceiling of dark wooden beams. Two 12 x 12 meter rooms are followed by a double-sized 12 x 24 meter hall and finally by other two 12 x 12 meter galleries. A central longitudinal main wall divides this rational eighteenthcentury architectural space into two main parts. Anri Sala extended this dividing structural wall so that it penetrated into the large double-sized hall, making this long wall central to the entire architecture. For the artist, it became a doublesided projection screen, passing through all the galleries. The central galleries on each side of the long main wall also had freestanding screens in them, further complicating the experience of viewers, who could choose which way to go. They could enter the space at one end and walk through all the galleries around the long wall, then exit and reenter in a looped itinerary. They could also walk behind or in front of the secondary separate screens, between them and the wall, in the interval: “I am interested in the idea that there is no destination to reach, that the finality is in the trajectory.”

He also created a synchronized system of multiple projectors so that the three works could be projected consecutively, one after another, in a peculiar way: with important intervals of blank wall in between sections of film, each appeared to literally go on a journey, moving from left to right around the entire space. Wherever you were, you would see the exact same frame of film and the sound in the entire space was in unison. There were two movements: the moving image in each film and the film itself as an object moving in the physical space in front of the viewers. As a viewer, you could choose to stand still and the film would pass by and exit to your right, but shortly thereafter reappear from your left, or you could walk with the moving film so that you would see its evolution in synch with your own body. Anri Sala stated: «The exhibition takes the form of a “parade,” where video works and their developing narratives travel across the entire space. Visitors can stroll with the flow, accompanying its nomadic substance across the consecutive rooms, gaining ground, or experience the itinerant works from a laid-back position, standing or sitting, as the works pass them by […]. Even if the sequence unfolds in the continuous present and simultaneously in all the rooms (ubiquitously), the notion of the future tense is omnipresent. From here comes this feeling that upsets us: one sees a film entering the room from the left just after one sees it leave the room to the right. The fact that the future (in a temporal sense) emerges from the space where we have just passed through produces a disturbance.

To produce this disturbance, the tempo of the intervals and the program for this work, the artist recreated the museum using Virtual Reality in his studio in Berlin, so that he could test the effects. At first sight, therefore, one might imagine that the work celebrates the potential of technology. Yet,

on the contrary, in our age of Artificial Intelligence and siliconization of the world, of constant self-displacement, attention to “elsewhere” because of our smart phones and social media, and traumatic severing of interiority from the experience of an embodied world, an installation like AS YOU GO relies on the most sophisticated technology of Virtual Reality and the mapping software Pandora to create an artwork of utterly analog reality. It celebrates the precise opposite of Virtual Reality, since Anri Sala uses technologies as tools with goals opposite to those for which they were created. “I am refining the parade as much as I can here in the studio,” he wrote from Berlin, adding, “I cannot wait to join you in Rivoli for a little bit of reality, because I am spending too much time in simulations and the virtual.”

To be embodied in a place means to be in the present moment. Anri Sala’s viewers are already in the present moment through watching films of musical performances recorded in the present moment. In AS YOU GO, there are no narratives, nor cuts to the past or future. Experiencing the movement of

the films around a carousel like a conveyor belt or a parade, the viewers become aware of being in the here and now. This attention to the present moment is a reprise of the phenomenological interests of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In this sense, Anri Sala claims the space of the exhibition — which in the past was considered a place of removal from reality — as a space of reality, of authenticity: a truly public space. What does this mean today? How does it relate or speak to the urgent questions of now? We live in an era of big data and reproduced images, with a flow of images produced and reproduced on the internet. Overwhelmed by data, we increasingly navigate them through programs of AI that interpret and do the thinking for us, and our only function is to “click.” The wish to rebuild situations of active interpretation is a counter-reaction to this disempowerment by algorithms. In this perspective, Anri Sala’s work is a form of political and aesthetic resistance to the passivity encouraged by the digital.

Interested in intervals in the rhythm of music, images, and experiences, he reverses in this exhibition the emerging paradigm of passivity of the visitors who receive the illusion of reality by standing still, inviting them instead to move with the images in a corporeal way, chasing them along the exhibition path. More than a presentation of three interwoven film works, it is a projection device that becomes a unique and gigantic sculpture in movement. As in earlier films that stage the aspirations and failures of modernity, there is a tone to much of Anri Sala’s work in AS YOU GO that refers to traumatized subjects and their ability to react.

With Ravel Ravel, the artist stages the simultaneous vision of two interpretations by two different pianists of the Concerto for the Left Hand. Composed by Ravel between 1929 and 1930, the concerto was commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during World War I. In the words of Anri Sala, “Ravel Ravel was born from the intention to present two performances with their respective tempos. Sometimes they play in unison and then chase each other in temporal shifts, producing echoes and repetitions that seem to transform the physicality of the exhibition space.”

In Take Over, he investigates the possible meanings arising from the juxtaposition of La Marseillaise and The Internationale, whose complex stories are intertwined. Composed in 1792 by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, La Marseillaise became the hallmark of the French Revolution to then spread to other countries and become a symbol of political freedom. At the end of the nineteenth century, The Internationale was the anthem of workers’ struggles, welcomed to promote ideals of equality and solidarity. Written in 1871, the text of The Internationale was initially sung to the tune of La Marseillaise. In 1888, Pierre Degeyter wrote the music with which it became the anthem of the international socialist movement. Taking inspiration from the plots that link these two famous musical pieces, as well as the distances and differences, Anri Sala’s work juxtaposes two consecutive performances: in one the pianist plays La Marseillaise on a mechanical piano that is programmed to play The Internationale, while in the second, the situation is reversed and the pianist plays The Internationale on a mechanical piano programmed to play La Marseillaise. Here, the competition between human and machine becomes explicit, reminding us of the difficulty of defying or contradicting automatic language correctors and many other algorithms of daily life. At times, the two anthems are in accord; at other times there is dissonance and they clash, just as, when considering the symbolic meanings of the songs themselves, we move back and forth, unable to resolve contradictory connotations: is The Internationale a song celebrating freedom, or does it instead represent oppression, as it would for a young person from Eastern Europe? Is La Marseillaise a revolutionary song, or a song belonging to colonizers, as it may be experienced, for example, in the Maghreb?

The music of the five-minute Elegy for Solo Viola (1944) by Igor Stravinsky in If and Only If seems distorted, slightly out of synch with the Lento tempo of the score. Here, it is longer than it is supposed to be, by just over nine minutes. The original elegy was commissioned from Stravinsky by the Belgian Germain Prévost in the middle of World War II as a homage to the violinist Alphonse Onnou, who had died in the US just after Hitler had invaded Belgium in 1940. The lengthening of the composition in Anri Sala’s work occurs because the viola player Gérard Caussé slows down or accelerates his playing in order to accommodate and protect a snail that moves slowly upwards along the wooden part of his bow to reach its tip, away from what is certainly a danger for it — the place of contact between string and instrument. There is a moment when a second snail suddenly appears on Caussé’s bow from the bottom left of the screen, so that you glimpse two snails at the same time on screen, at different positions on the bow. This double appears like a glitch, putting into question the binary and simplistic interpretation of what we are seeing, suggesting there is a space outside the frame where decisions have been made by an author, and the film is a montage of different shots. This moment of awareness of the factual, fabricated and constructed nature of the recorded image is a moment of awareness of our own ability to be attentive, to be precise, to be singular, to be alive — of homo faber within animal laborans. Because of the looped nature of AS YOU GO, this poetic homage to the need to coordinate between human and nonhuman agencies, Caussé and the snail(s), ultimately become a filmic construction where the film could dilate and play infinitely along a strip of wall, the snail forever moving up the bow, and forever starting over. We progress and yet are always at the start, in an existential condition where time is at once linear, circular, multiple, and overlapping.

Indeed, as the axis of the entire building was elongated, the main projection wall became a gigantic bow itself, and we, the viewers, either walked, like the snail, along it up to its tip and around the edge of the wall that ended halfway through the large double-sized gallery, turned around and walked down the other opposite side, following the movement of the scrolling films, or we chose to stay put and watch the film go by us. We are in a space of temporal plasticity, where the violist extends the duration and metamorphosizes the interpretation of a score in order to accommodate and cohabit with a snail (perhaps two, or potentially infinite snails) living on his bow, bending the music to accommodate his movements to those of the snail… until they belong together, as Anri Sala put it. This continuous evolution and plasticity of film in space as a consequence of difficult conditions, such as finding oneself on a human viola player’s bow, recalls Catherine Malabou’s concepts. In Ontology of the Accident. An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2009), she addresses the

transformation and change that can occur in the aftermath of trauma, as the consequence of a form of improvisation able to address the need of a subject to regain life: «In the usual order of things, lives run their course like rivers. The changes and metamorphoses of a life due to vagaries and difficulties, or simply the natural unfolding of circumstance, appear as the marks and wrinkles of a continuous, almost logical, process of fulfillment that leads ultimately to death. In time, one eventually becomes who one is; one becomes only who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but reinforce the permanence of identity, caricaturing or fixing it, but never contradicting it. They never disrupt identity. This gradual existential and biological incline, which can only ever transform the subject into itself, does not, however, obviate the powers of plasticity of this same identity that houses itself beneath an apparently smooth surface like a reserve of dynamite hidden under the peachy skin of being for death. As a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all, the path splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person, and eventually takes up all the room. An unrecognizable persona whose present comes from no past, whose future harbors nothing to come, an absolute existential improvisation. A form born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident. A new being comes into the world for a second time, out of a deep cut that opens in a biography».

This augural subjectivity usually emerges from damage, and involves becoming a stranger to one’s former self, but such transformation may also be apparently inexplicable, not emerging from any evident trauma. Malabou calls this transformative agency “destructive plasticity” and suggests that the forgetting of the former self is a displacement of pain: “What destructive plasticity invites us to consider is the suffering caused by an absence of suffering, in the emergence of a new form of being, a stranger to the one before. Pain that manifests as indifference to pain, impassivity, forgetting, the loss of symbolic reference points.” This is the “survivor’s identity, a never before seen existential and vital configuration. A brain damaged identity which, even as an absence from the self, is nonetheless well and truly a psyche. […] Plasticity thus refers to the possibility of being transformed without being destroyed; it characterizes the entire strategy of modification that seeks to avoid the threat of destruction.” Malabou’s approach contrasts with the philosopher and psychologist Henri Bergson’s late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century theories of “creative evolution,” in which time and the experience of consciousness are in a constant state of flow with no ruptures, even though there are accelerations and contractures. At the same time, Malabou builds on his sense of time as subjective duration. Indeed, she acknowledges that there is slow progressive change and there are also sudden instantaneous transformations, and

for the traumatized subject, both occur at once.

The space/time that Anri Sala addresses in his works is often that where both such forms of transformation occur and interact, in the interval between the before and the after, the former self and the new subjectivity. An interval is a space or gap between objects, units, points, or states. It is more generally associated with the field of music, theater, and cinema as a period of time or duration, usually brief, between two parts, acts or sections of a performance, during which the audience regains consciousness of being in an embodied reality, after and before being transported through the imagination into the parallel world of the performance. It can be a simple blank interruption, intermission and interstice, or it can contain an interlude, a form of content in its own

right, like a bridge between two parts of a song.

The existence of an interval therefore implies a form of discontinuity, a before and an after. Yet at the same time, the interval implies its own antonym — which is continuity — because it connects two previously distinct parts. Generally, this juncture is imagined as having no space at all, as just a line or division between a here and a there, a before and an after. Yet this line is thick, and it is more an interval than a point of contact; it is the space between the giornate in a fresco, it is a zone of overlap where the past pushes into the future as memory, and memory constitutes the substance of presence. This is the space of plasticity, of metamorphosis, the space where a pianist learns the virtuosic ability to play, with only one hand, an entire concerto that sounds as if it were played by two, as in Ravel Ravel, or where a subject learns to confront and remember her former, forgotten self with the help of her son, the artist Anri Sala, and of a school for handicapped children able to read her lips, as in Intervista, or the interval that is night, the solitary time when Jacques can be at peace in Nocturnes (1999), or the interval between sleep and wake, learning to rest even in a seated position as does the old homeless man in Uomoduomo (2000), or the space/time of waiting for a bomb to fall during the instant between the sound of its falling and the crash, as in Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2) (2002), or the interval during which a community paints a city in bright colors in Dammi i Colori (2003), or the plastic urban space of walking from home to a rehearsal in a vulnerable Sarajevo during the days of the siege in 1992–96, when snipers terrorized the population by shooting at innocent by-passers from the hills above, in 1395 Days without Red (2011).

In discussing time and temporality, Giorgio Agamben distinguishes chronological time (time characterized by homogeneous linearity, with a succession of moments with no qualitative distinction between one moment and another) from kairological time, which is a special time, detached from linear chronology, where the moment is distinct, an event hic et nunc, perceived as outside normal time. Messianic time (the time after Christ’s death, as told in the New Testament) is a form of time where every moment of messianic time repeats and completes an event that occurred before the birth of Christ (as told in the Old Testament), in a sequence of moments of Kairos. What Agamben does not address, however, is time as duration, nor the time between events, the left-over or residue of the great moments of historical or messianic events, as it is experienced in consciousness. These are the intervals of history, the intervals of daily life, entwined with the experience of waiting, itself often a space where emotions such as fear are perceived, or a mixture between boredom and fear and expectation occurs. The experience of time speeding up and slowing down, curving, folding, overlapping, twisting—its distortion, in other words—is very much the experience of Anri Sala’s universe, a more complex world of temporality than that of the daily common sense, but surely one more structurally subtle, a deeper one. It is an extra time, extra space, pushing into the space and time in which we live, the chronological time, and the kairological time of the instant. It is the elastic, extended durée that pushes itself into the real. Improvisation is the technique of plasticity in the interval and it relies on moments of repose, which interrupt the flow of duration, creating a “spatialized temporality” and “rhythm time.”

In Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2), a young man from Belgrade named Mihajlo simulates over and over again, like a foley artist, his memories of hearing at night the whistling sound of a missile falling, including the moment of silence — the gap or interval — just before it hits its target. Anri Sala writes, “what moved me most about Mihajlo […] was the unyielding detachment he felt towards what hit him: that strange event known as the ‘surgical strike.’ Though it did not place his life in danger, at night it stopped him living it, creating a sense of ennui.” The gap or interval as a subject comes up again when the artist writes about the work time after time (2003), in which for a little over five minutes, he films a horse on a highway at night in Tirana, standing still near a cement barrier, unable to escape from the terrifying trucks and cars speeding by. The horse lifts its hoof over and over again, the nervous repetition of a suffering animal. Does the title refer to the repetition of the passing cars, or to the time after time that Agamben described? Anri Sala writes, “Is it possible to produce a visible manifestation of loss? What is the appearance of what is not entirely there? There must be a singular way of inscribing beings or things in the present so that they embody simultaneously what they used to be and no longer are, consequently representing their disappearance in progress.”

Anri Sala is able to sculpt intervals so that they connect rather than disconnect. He focuses on the emotional tones produced by distortions of perspective, translations, interpretations, and transformations in order to heighten consciousness, believing in the emancipatory potential of high art and culture. For him, the making of art, and the experiencing of it, aims to create awareness and understanding of how manipulation works. Art exercises consciousness by exploring the delay that interrupts the automatism of the uninterrupted flow of information, without intervals and gaps.

In AS YOU GO, no matter where you find yourself in real space along the looped wall/conveyor belt, the image of the film you are watching is contemporaneously everywhere at exactly the same point in the film, as if we were in front of a classical cinema screen. It is a Klein bottle situation therefore, like a 3D Möbius strip, where we the viewers (we, the people) are not standing passively at a central point wearing VR goggles, experiencing a virtual 360 degrees world, our bodies vestigial and atrophied except for our necks turning up and down in servile slavery. Rather, we are looking at the 360 degrees Bubble Vision from the outside, choosing at every moment whether to walk along with the flowing moving image and see the internal movement of its frames, or whether to stand still and watch the film move by us, awaiting the next scene to reach us from the left.

According to Hito Steyerl, new immersive technologies isolate viewers from the world: «The viewer is at the center of the sphere, yet at the same time, [is] actually missing. They are fully immersed in something they are not part of […] This kind of vision is shaped by round things, by orbs, by spheres, by rounded lenses. One could call this paradigm “Bubble Vision”. In the last decade, 360 panoramas became common in photography, in video and in VR. In parallel, there were a lot of discussions of “filter bubbles” that are said to create division by creating parallel information universes even though those statements have been contested».

Anri Sala celebrates the highest possible degree of sophisticated culture, the most precise reverberation of a chord, touched by the keenest pianist, in the face of ineptness, superficiality, stupidity. The more he tweaks his works in space, seeking a certain perfection, the better they become, dense with the efforts of reaching a rhythm that is emotionally potent for himself and, by extension, for others. But there is something Sisyphean in this attempt. “Perfect” seems like an arbitrary word. Perfect according to what and to whom? And is this not an elitist concept to be put away for good in the name of democratic aesthetics?

Perficere, in Latin, is to “complete” something. It is not dissimilar to the notion of precision, from prae (before) and caedere (to cut), although one term implies a gained sense of wholeness (as opposed to separateness, to being in parts), while the other suggests a defined edge, the edge where something has been cut off precisely, thus heightening the edge of what is felt to be complete. The quality of the work is defined by its precision and its perfection.

And yet, Anri Sala stays with the trouble — provoking the definiteness of the edge dividing the surface from the nonsurface, or provoking the boundary between the non-perfect, the non-whole, and the perfect, the complete, the whole. He digs deep into the intervals one did not notice, the spaces on the edge that become distorted or pulled or extended to make space for a miracle, a little bit of extra time, a little bit of extra space, a hesitation. And in these gaps, in these intervals (the time between the sound of the bomb falling and the explosion when it hits the ground) he finds a space of refuge, a space of suspended time and history, of suspended conflict, of peace, a little “extra” conquered at great pain, that is a space of freedom for the individual, an extra-libidinal energy, purposeless, not quantifiable in an economy of time. Our bodies are separated by distances and by shards of overdetermined identities that divide and fragment us, like zombies or ghosts, or survivors perhaps, in a splintered world in which we speak to each other in short summary messages that shoot across the globe in apparent simultaneity. Something intrinsic to all of Anri Sala’s work, however, helps to suture the parts, to connect them like the different giornate of a fresco, and this is “the attempt to create a continuity between moments that are separated or have been torn apart, giving presence to what has become absent.”

Anri Sala celebrates the highest forms of human culture as the expression of committed minds, practiced craftspeople, and able musicians — animalia laborantes that redeem a confused homo faber, in order to contrast the self-perception of the human turned into an imperfect, fragile organism by the technophile ideology of Artificial Intelligence. Thus he does not create an artwork embodied like a VR program. He rather reins in and bends VR to become a mere tool, useful to his craft of improvising a moving space/sound/film machine. Once the work was accomplished, he let go of the VR, like in a digital detox clinic, and celebrated instead our wanderings through the barely lit galleries of the museum, a space of a new Situationist dérive, a space of bodily freedom in which

to stroll, to sit, to stay, to go, free to repose, and to pose the question: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” The ultimate question is one of a radical freedom of choice, unwired, unplugged, virtuosically human, and in tender miscegenation with our living allies. Like the snails.

BEFORE SOUND BECOMES MUSIC

Marcella Beccaria

I shall now perform a small experiment. I push the glass of water beside my computer to the edge of the desk. I then push it a bit further, until part of the bottom sticks out over the edge, and go on pushing, millimeter by millimeter. I hold my breath as my finger touches the surface of the glass. What I want to see, or rather perceive, is the moment that separates the presence of the glass on my desk from its fall to the ground. I am not performing this experiment in order to explain the law of gravity to my daughter or to make room in my working space — even though this is sorely needed. I am doing it for myself, in order to explain to myself, albeit with a certain degree of approximation,

the most indefinable and at the same time pervasive aspect of Anri Sala’s art, namely his deep interest in what he calls the “present moment.” Almost as though opening up the hic et nunc of the ancient Latin world to the complexity of quantum mechanics, Sala’s present moment is a constantly expanding investigation that enables him to capture in his works the ineffable meaningfulness of the instant in which reality is on the point of materializing, thus revealing a dense interweaving of possibilities. To draw a comparison with the analogical world, it is as though his present moment were capable of isolating the inexpressible instant in which the hour hand is about to move. Nor is this all. Instead of presenting themselves as possible documents that record a specific present moment related in every case to a particular situation, the artist’s works also act as devices capable of triggering that instant, thus themselves becoming joint producers of the enigmatic fragment of time and space that separates before and after. The ways in which this spark is struck, giving rise to gripping experiential situations, is the subject addressed here, in connection with the exhibition AS YOU GO and the work Bridges in the Doldrums displayed there.

Devised by the artist for the galleries on the third floor of the Castello di Rivoli, AS YOU GO presents the films Ravel Ravel (2013), Take Over (2017), and If and Only If (2018) in a new dynamic sequence. The exhibition begins to subtly manifest itself to the visitor as a series of sounds pervading the interstitial spaces, including the stairs and the entrance on the third floor. The sounds are enigmatic, evidently percussive but with an unusual rhythm that defies deciphering. As we draw

closer, the mystery is solved—but only in part. The origin of the sounds is revealed as four snare drums, each with a seductive chrome skin, positioned on the floor and ceiling. Each drum is being struck by a pair of drumsticks, apparently wielded by invisible hands, since no mechanism is detected by the eye. Closer investigation reveals that their movement is responding to the vibrations of the reflecting surface of each drum, inside which the artist has placed two speakers, one low-frequency and the other mid-range. The low-frequency speaker generates the vibrations that trigger the skin, which in response makes the drumsticks move, thus reversing the habitual relationship whereby the percussive action is performed by the drumsticks. The initially slow rhythm gradually becomes quicker in a gripping crescendo. Thanks to the audible sounds emitted by the mid-range speakers, as opposed to the inaudible sounds emitted by the low-frequency ones, it sometimes seems possible to recognize something, perhaps a familiar tune, but only for a few beats before another rhythm takes over.

Anri Sala describes the work in question, Bridges in the Doldrums (2016), as follows: “a three-part arrangement for saxophone, trombone, and clarinet […] constructed solely from the bridges of 74 pop, jazz and folk songs from different periods and geographies.” The work was developed by Sala from an initial version in the form of a performance held at the Havana Biennial in 2015. Produced in collaboration with the musician André Vida, this initially included 100 songs in an arrangement for saxophone, trombone, and flute, which was subsequentely reworked and edited down to 74 songs, as an arrangement for saxophone, trombone, and clarinet. This updated version of the performance was recorded in a studio in Berlin to become the soundtrack of the sculptural piece Bridges in the Doldrums. Prior to the Castello di Rivoli, the work was presented at Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, where it was installed with two additional speakers in an adjacent room that played the full audible soundtrack. In all the versions described, the instruments selected often play parts originally written for others, thus responding to one another and altering their role. The fulcrum of the work is always the “bridge,” the short passage in a piece of popular music, usually of four or eight beats, leading up to the melody of the refrain. If the refrain can be described as the apotheosis of the song, the moment in which the latter actually manifests itself, often in such an immediately recognizable form as to become haunting, especially in pop music, the bridge is instead a passage of tension, almost of indecision, in which the instruments can halt the tempo by falling silent together for a brief instant. As a result, the listeners are separated momentarily from what they know before being plunged into the refrain, almost like reaching a safe harbor after being lost on unknown seas. As the artist explains, “the bridge alienates the listener from the song itself, keeping one’s attention while suspending one’s belief and expectations, until the chorus returns to reconfirm their acquaintance with it.”

In Bridges in the Doldrums the progression toward ever-faster rhythms further enhances the intrinsic value of the concept of the bridge. By extending the tension of awaiting some recognizable tune, the work constantly renews a sense of expectation and desire. Instead of granting listeners the satisfaction of a known melody, it unceasingly teases their desire for safety, building up palpable tension on every encounter. Paradoxically enough, in this process, during which many instants renew the unrecognizability of those preceding them, visitors are confronted with what they presumably know best, that is, their own faces and expressions. The chrome finish of each drum functions as a gleaming mirror that captures whatever appears before it, thus visually confirming that the work is a part of reality in a given place and a precise moment.

As always in Sala’s art, the title of the work adds a further level of interpretation (the artist insists on keeping all of his titles in the language in which he originally conceived them and avoiding any attempt at translation). The play on words here is evident between the drums, which give the work its sculptural shape, and the “doldrums” (probably derived from a combination of “dull” and “tantrum”), a nautical term that entered English in the nineteenth century. In addition to a condition or state of mind, it also indicates the area now known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Extending a few miles north and south of the Equator in accordance with unpredictable seasonal fluctuations, this belt encircling the globe and its oceans is characterized by low atmospheric pressure that reduces the speed of winds, which become extremely variable or completely absent. Dead calm can alternate with sudden storms, trapping sail-driven vessels for days or weeks on end. Sadly familiar to the sailors who first crossed the oceans and still feared by present-day transoceanic crews, the doldrums correspond to stretches of sea in which sailors know that they have no control over their fate and exist in a state of constant uncertainty.

Further investigation into the semantic possibilities reverberating in the title reveal that the term “bridge” also establishes an unprecedented relationship with the site of Castello di Rivoli. Sala chose to display the work in the room on the third floor of the museum, an unusual kind of loft, which is now equipped with a bridge-like walkway after renovation by the architect Andrea Bruno. During the restoration, commenced in 1979 with the idea of enabling visitors to appreciate the stunning technical complexity of the building’s architecture (as developed by Carlo Randoni from 1793 after the initial work by Filippo Juvarra), Bruno decided to dispense with a conventional floor and design a metal walkway running diagonally across the room, widening out in the middle. This allows viewers to see the extrados of the masonry ceiling of the vast and imposing room below on the second floor. Bruno’s restoration project also preserved the reinforced-concrete roof trusses of the loft as part of the building’s history. Built by the Italian civil engineering corps in 1948, these structures replaced the original wooden beams destroyed in 1943, when Castello di Rivoli was struck by an incendiary bomb during the dramatic air raids of World War II. Sala embraces this extraordinary combination of history and memories by placing one drum on the eighteenth-century extrados and hanging the others on the twentieth-century trusses. The middle of the walkway thus becomes a place rife with meaning, introducing visitors to the sequence of films that comprise AS YOU GO and offering them their first experience of the artist’s focus on the poetic value of the “present moment.”

As often in the artist’s work, where various strands of investigation run parallel and one work can give birth to another, Bridges in the Doldrums is located within a sequential, organic evolution that includes snare drums as sound-emitting sculptures. First appearing in Sala’s art in the spring of 2009 with A Solo in the Doldrums, this “family” can be traced back in turn to themes regarding the ways in which a given place influences the unfolding of the events that occur in it, as initially explored in the video work Answer Me (2008). Shot in Teufelsberg near Berlin, Answer Me is set in a former secret base, previously used by the CIA and NSA to eavesdrop on Soviet communications during the Cold War. The iconic geodesic dome becomes the scene of a peculiar “quasi-dialogue” between a man and a woman based on a short text by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. While the woman attempts to establish verbal dialogue and obtain answers as she seeks to end their affair, the man concentrates all his attention on drumming. Sitting with his back to her, he uses the drum kit to produce a dense series of sounds that drown her words and cause her to fall silent, thus transforming the void of his silence into a solid wall of noise. Though unwilling to enter into conversation, the man establishes a sort of communication that consists of replacing the language of words with musical frequencies. The acoustic characteristics of the dome create a distinctly long echo (Sala’s male lead is a professional percussionist who devised the rhythmic sequence in precise relation to the frequency response of the space in which the film is set). In one scene, the camera captures the woman’s anguish and her awareness that she is receiving answers even though in non-verbal form. More explicit than so many words, the man’s rhythmic drumming makes her deeply distraught. As she holds her bent head between her hands, the snare drum beside her reacts in turn to the power of the long echo sweeping through the dome. Even though no one is actually wielding the drumsticks, they respond to the vibrations imparted to its surface.

As the artist observes, music has gradually taken on a predominant function in his work as a form of expression that, unlike language, amplifies perception of the present: “It is believed that the longest present moments — those pieces of time in which memory is not yet activated and notions of past and future do not arise—occur while listening to music.” It is after Answer Me that snare drums, to which the artist refers generically as “doldrums,” become autonomous works as a logical consequence of their genesis. But unlike in the film, where the frequencies in the dome generate the vibration of the drum and the response of the sticks, in Sala’s subsequent sound sculptures this relationship is reversed. By inserting a low-frequency speaker into the drum, the artist engineers the

work so that it is the instrument itself, from the inside, that causes the drumsticks to move. What remains predominant is the role of the “doldrum” as an agent capable of capturing in sonic form — and in accordance with a predilection for the abstract that runs through the artist’s work as a whole— certain characteristics of a given place. It is indeed through the “doldrums” that Sala is able to embrace stories, memories, tensions, and fears, but also physical characteristics such as architecture or even geographic situations and meteorological conditions, and “translate” them into frequencies. These frequencies, which may or may not be audible, gradually open up each work to new interactions and potential meanings. It is this simultaneous presence, this extraordinary array of potentialities, that enables us as visitors to experience the “present moment” to the full, almost as though helping us to attain a state of deep meditation.

Sala explored the great potential inherent in snare drums as elements that reiterate the truth of the present in his first major show in an American museum, namely Purchase Not By Moonlight at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in the winter of 2008. Five snare drums were positioned in relation to the columned building’s architectural structure and to the selection of films presented, including Answer Me. Interpreting the setting of his films as a veritable choreography with a corresponding rhythmic basis, the artist develops a low-frequency track for each and plays it in synchrony with the film through speakers inserted in snare drums. The movements of the sticks on each drum respond to and reiterate the rhythm of each of the films shown, thus creating a kind of soundtrack made up of pure percussion. While in Purchase Not By Moonlight Sala does not regard the “doldrums” as an autonomous work, the exhibition constitutes a significant precedent, a sort of “meta-work” within the trajectory that also includes AS YOU GO. It should indeed be emphasized that AS YOU GO was conceived by the artist as both an exhibition and a work. Understood as a new

piece conceived especially for Castello di Rivoli comprising a set of works, it can be defined in all respects as a “metaexhibition,” thus extending the premises identifiable in the first presentation in Miami. The first autonomous work in the “family” of doldrums is A Solo in the Doldrums (2009). It was born out of an invitation from the British choreographer Siobhan Davies to produce a joint work. Sala responded by asking Davies to devise a choreography to be staged in the absence of any audience. Having fitted Davies with a microphone to record the sounds of her breathing and movements while dancing, he then translated these into lowfrequency impulses, inaudible to the human ear, and played them on the drum’s inbuilt speaker so that the drumsticks responded to the vibrations. In this sense, the work adds an important element: the paradox of making the invisible visible, placing viewers in the condition of awaiting the movements and sounds of the drumsticks without being able to foretell when they will come.

With the works immediately following this, namely Another Solo in the Doldrums (2011), presented at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and Another Solo in the Doldrums (Extended Play) (2012), devised for his exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Sala developed the frequencies (again in inaudible form) on the basis of the soundtrack resulting from the set of video works presented in the two shows. While the works function in these specific contexts as responses to the sonic emissions that pervade the space, their having been extrapolated from their original setting turns them into memories of past shows, in accordance with a procedure further developed with Another Clash in the Doldrums (2014). Conceived by Sala in conjunction with the Vincent Award, where he presented the pieces Le Clash (2010) and Tlateloco Clash (2011) on two back-to-back screens, the work is a snare drum that responds to the translation in low frequencies of sounds present in the two works. The resulting track seems to represent a sort of competition between the two videos for control over the vibrations to be transmitted to the drumsticks.

Names in the Doldrums (2014) saw his first insertion of two speakers into the snare drum, one emitting inaudible low frequencies, as in the previous works, and the other mid-range frequencies, which can be heard by the human ear. The work was created within the framework of a solo show at

the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Sala’s first in Israel, and in relation to the dramatic events occurred shortly before, thus expanding the idea that the work responds to the place and to the echoes that inhabit it. A few weeks before the opening of the exhibition, which Sala significantly called No Names, No Title, violent clashes in the Gaza Strip led to the tragic deaths of numerous children. In his studio in Berlin, the artist heard the sad list of names read out on the radio. Banned by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority and no longer transmitted, the recording was used by the artist as part of his work, not only preserving the broadcast

of the human voice reading the list of names, but also reiterating its silencing enforced by local authorities: while the speaker transmitted the recording of the voice reading the names, the low frequencies emitted vibrations to the drumsticks, so that the soundtrack simultaneously produced and cancelled the sounds of the names.

Delving deeper into the original concept of the doldrums as a physical and mental locus of the immobility that accompanies unforeseeable events, Sala then used references to the history of art, music, and popular culture in what can be identified as a further group of works within this broad “family.” In Still life in the Doldrums (d’après Cézanne) (2015) the wooden drumsticks are customized so that the ends that should be held by the drummer look like two human calf bones, while a composition made up of four human skulls hangs from the ceiling above the drum. Arranged to form a pyramid, the skulls constitute a citation of Paul Cézanne’s Pyramid of Skulls (1901). The painting is one of the works in which the master’s exploration of still life, and in particular the genre of memento mori or vanitas painting, reveals an anguished obsession with the fleetingness of life and the possible awareness of his approaching death. Sala preserves the expressive pictorial quality of the original by painting the skulls in subtle shades of ivory with burnished nuances. The stark message of Cézanne’s memento mori is somehow amplified by the way in which the sculptural group, hung on thin nylon threads, sways in response to the movement of the drumsticks. Moments of immobility alternate with vigorous action triggered by the vibrations and the noises — some audible and others inaudible — emitted by the soundtrack that forms part of the work. Opening up to multiple twists, the soundtrack includes a free rearrangement of Arnold Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1899), composed shortly before Cézanne’s painting, and snatches of music from Tom and Jerry cartoons. Composed by Scott Bradley, a former pupil of Schönberg in California, these tunes contributed to the success of Walt Disney’s creation. The fact that Disney was born in 1901, the year of Cézanne’s painting, is a further coincidence that becomes meaningful in Sala’s association. Besides the evident presence of different human skulls, Still life in the Doldrums (Don’t Explain) (2015) differs from the work described above in terms of sound content.

While retaining some of Bradley’s tunes, Sala adds excerpts from the jazz song Don’t Explain (1946) by Billy Holiday and from the cover version by Nina Simone (1964), a reference to the fact that jazz was established as a musical genre at the turn of the century, when Cézanne painted his skulls. Both of the above works respond to questions Sala asked himself: “How can a doldrum play a still life? How can immobility activate something that must by its very nature remain motionless?” Well aware that he is entering an area on the borderline of paradox, he also harnesses the physical potentialities offered by the sculptural form employed, which enables him through its development in the round to show the back of the still life: the hidden side that the painting cannot show.

A later group of works, with greater importance now attached to the gravity-defying use of space in mid-air, features snare drums hung from the ceiling upside-down so that the playing surface is visible to the viewers below. The titles of this 2015 group, including Moth in the Doldrums (Overtone Oscillations), Moth in B-flat, Moth in D and Transfigured Moth, all refer to the moth, an insect that the artist finds interesting for its close relationship with the butterfly and preference for nocturnal rather than diurnal activity. These works are also characterized by increased complexity of the sound component. For Moth in B-flat, Moth in D and Transfigured Moth, the basis of the soundtrack is once again Schönberg’s early composition Verklärte Nacht, which interests Sala as belonging to the tonal period of the Austrian master, who then went on to develop atonal music, becoming one of the most important practitioners of Expressionism in the musical sphere. Exploring the musical structure devised by Schönberg for Verklärte Nacht, whose initially unfavorable reception was due to the use of a chord not contemplated in the treatises on harmony of the period, in each work of the Moth group Sala pursues his investigations differently. In Transfigured Moth, for example, he isolates the moments in which a new tone appears. Here he uses a procedure based on the principle of the twelve-tone technique, otherwise known as atonal theory, developed by Schönberg in his maturity. What does not change is the way in which the artist isolates the notes that will make up his soundtrack in each case. Applying a method that is at variance with the compositional ideas used in Verklärte Nacht and belongs instead to Schönberg’s later work, Sala makes the notes played appear almost in the instant when they are expelled from the composition, triggering en passant the reaction of the drumsticks. Like the unpredictable winds blowing in the equatorial zone of the doldrums, these works expose visitors to multiple trajectories with no possibility of identifying one dominant direction.

In Moth in the Doldrums (Overtone Oscillations) two snare drums are set a few meters apart, one standing on the floor, the other suspended from the ceiling. The source of the sound component is a performance held in London at the Barbican in the summer of 2015. Here Sala collaborated with Anna-Maria Hefele, a specialist in overtone or harmonic singing — a technique originally adopted in Asian philosophical and spiritual practices to attain states of deep meditation, where one voice sings a fundamental note and its overtone at the same time. In this period, while pursuing a number of other projects, as is often the case, Sala also undertook an examination of the history and musical structure of La Marseillaise and The Internationale that led in 2017 to the film Take Over, which is included in AS YOU GO. Making use of the overtone technique, Sala intermingles the two anthems in such a way as to highlight their historical affinity and musical kinship.

In-Between the Doldrums (Pac-Man) (2016) also consists of two snare drums, one standing on the ground, the other hanging from the ceiling. Separated by a few inches gap, due to their proximity, the drumsticks play both of their skins in unison, emitting a solid body of sound that reinforces the power of the piece as a producer of authentic “present moments.” Moreover, both snare drums feature reflective chrome skin, which is here used by Sala for the first time, opening up to an exploration of the concept of the “space in between,” another of his favorite areas of investigation. Placed one above the other, the two chrome skins generate a multiplication of reflections that the artist describes as “an infinity of in-between spaces,” with a visual density that enriches the visitor’s synaesthetic experience.

Chronologically, the next work in the doldrums “family” is Bridges in the Doldrums, described at the beginning of this essay. This piece is followed by 43 Names in the Doldrums (2017). Presented as a snare drum hung from the ceiling, the work is based on a tragic event that took place in Mexico

on September 26, 2014. An attack on a group of about 80 students from Ayotzinapa traveling to a emonstration in Mexico City to commemorate the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 led to a number of deaths and the still unexplained disappearance of 43 students, as well as arrests by the local police. In Sala’s work, the names of the missing students are read out by a female voice and transmitted by the speaker inside the snare drum. Because of the low frequencies contained in the spoken words, the drum skin vibrates and triggers the drumsticks, whose rat-a-tat prevents the names from being heard. Not unlike Names in the Doldrums, the work referring to the children killed in the Gaza Strip, 43 Names in the Doldrums sends a clear message, reiterating the use of political pressure to silence any talk of tragic events and exposing its coercive nature.

Conceived as a site-specific installation for Kaldor Public Art Projects in Sydney, Australia, The Last Resort (2017) is the most ambitious of the doldrums works created by the artist so far. It consists of 38 snare drums with reflecting surfaces hung from the ceiling of an outdoor pavilion overlooking the city’s majestic bay on Observatory Hill, a strategic vantage point already known to the Aborigine peoples, and previously the site of Fort Philip, built in 1800 as part of the first defensive works of the Sydney penal colony. As in the previous works, the snare drums are specially altered and, in this case, each fitted with two speakers, a low-frequency and a mid-range one. Reflecting on the early days of the colonial occupation with the arrival of Captain James Cook in Botany Bay in January 1770, followed by the First Fleet of eleven ships carrying convicts as well as officers and their families in 1788, Sala uses Mozart’s almost contemporary Clarinet Concerto in

A major, K. 622 (1791) as a soundtrack. Once again, he alters the music on the basis of precise rules, derived in this case from a reading of the diary of James Bell, a precious historical source again dating from the early days of the British colonization of Australia. Written in 1838, the diary records the epic voyage of its 20-year-old author, kept at sea for six long months instead of the expected 130 days by a series of misfortunes and unexpected setbacks, exposed to all kinds of weather conditions as well as unimaginable situations of corruption and immorality on board. Sala replaces Mozart’s original indications of tempo with observations on wind strength drawn from Bell’s diary, an extraordinary coming-ofage story that narrates the author’s ever-closer contact with the degeneration of most of his traveling companions. The resulting melody was then played by an orchestra and recorded by Sala with separate microphones for each musician. These tracks were installed in the upside-down snare drums, which were arranged in such a way that their positions reflected a possible orchestra playing in the pavilion.

Sala sees his alteration of Mozart’s concerto as a sort of poetic deterioration due to the great length of a hard and exhausting voyage like the one made by Bell and the early settlers. As he wrote in his notes on the work, “I wanted to imagine how a fictional journey through the winds, the waves, and the water currents of the high seas would affect a musical masterpiece of the age of Enlightenment; what would become of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto if it were to float and drift like a message in a bottle, until washed ashore after a long voyage?” Picking up the echoes of a distant past, the insistence on the concept of corruption that shapes the work also captures the tragic impact of colonial domination in a land where the reiteration of sounds and songs in their original form is an integral part of the spiritual culture of the Aborigines, according to a sacred ritual bond that enables them to create creation anew every time they sing.

� In his essay “Manutensions, or Anri Sala’s Outstretched Hands,” Peter Szendy plays with the words maintenir (to hold) and maintenant (now), writing that Sala “likes for us to feel the tension that maintains it now [maintenant]”: in Anri Sala. Ravel Ravel Unravel, published on the occasion of the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, exhibition catalog, edited by C. Macel and A. Sala (Giardini della Biennale, French Pavillion, Venice), Paris: Manuella Éditions, Institut français, Centre national des arts plastiques, 2013, p. 105. He writes about Ravel Ravel (2013), based on a score written in 1929–30 by Maurice Ravel for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I. In this work, two films are projected onto two screens, each showing a performer’s left hand playing the French composer’s concerto in a virtuosic reparation of the hand through the representation of two left hands: “What interests Anri Sala is visibly the manual work, the manipulation necessary to make, to manufacture a musical phrase worthy of the name […] a presence that is constantly manufactured from [the hands’] radical disjuncture”: ibid., pp. 109–10.

� Richerd Sennett’s The Craftsman, published in 2008, posits the importance of manual labor and craft as a form of thinking with matter, and material consciousness, without fear of speaking about a form of quality-driven work, which recalls the chiseling away that all editing and finalizing of an installation by Sala entails. While celebrating and continuing the political philosophical practice of Hannah Arendt, of whom he was a student, Sennet also distances himself from her hierarchy between the maker of things, the engineer, and the political guidance needed. She had expressed her ideas in The Human Condition in 1958, shortly after the fi rst nuclear bombs. Her hierarchy manual labor — animal laborans —the human who takes the work as an end in itself, the engineer or creator of technology who does not refl ect on its implications — is positioned below homo faber, the human who refl ects on the “Why?” of making things and who thus exercises politics (the philosophical enquiry through human speech and conscious action), which constitute the public realm, which makes life fully lived. In this public realm, people should decide which technologies to pursue and which to repress. Arendt contrasts homo faber — the human as conscious maker—to the animal laborans who is absorbed in a task. According to Arendt, says Sennett, “people who make things usually don’t understand what they are doing. Arendt’s fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora.” In the “public realm, through debate, people ought to decide which technologies should be encouraged and which should be repressed.” Furthermore, for Arendt, decisions should stay provisional and change over time: “The rules issuing from deliberation are cast in doubt as conditions change and people ponder further; new, provisional rules then come into being. Arendt’s contribution to this tradition turns in part on the insight that the political process exactly parallels the human condition of giving birth and then letting go of the children we have made and raised. Arendt speaks of natality in describing the process of birth, formation, and separation in politics. The fundamental fact of life is that nothing lasts — yet in politics we need something to orient us, to lift us above the confusions of the moment. The pages of The Human Condition explore how language might guide us, as it were, to swim against the turbulent waters of time”: R. Sennett, The Crafstman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 2–6.

�Anri Sala in conversation with the author, January 2019.

�Ibid.

� É. Sadin, La silicolonisation du monde. L’irrésistible expansion du libéralisme numérique (Paris: Éditions L’Échappée, 2016).

�Anri Sala in conversation with the author, 15 January 2019.

�Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945] (New York: Routledge, 2013).

�C. Malabou, Ontology of the Accident. An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. 5 (first ed. Ontologie de l’accident. Essai sur la plasticité destructrice, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2009).

�Ibid., p. 18.

�Ibid. pp. 19 e 44-45.

�See Marcella Beccaria's essay in this volume.

�G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002). First ed. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998).

� In La dialectique de la durée [1936] (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950), Gaston Bachelard develops these ideas from the notion of rhythmanalysis conceived by the Brazilian theoretician Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos in 1931. See Dialectic of Duration (Geneva: Clinamen Press, 2000).

�See here, p. 125.

�See here, p. 127.

� Hito Steyerl first referred to Bubble Vision in a brief lecture at the Serpentine Marathon GUEST, GHOST, HOST: MACHINE!, City Hall, London, October 7, 2017, which was repeated in a longer form at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design in Michigan on January 31,, 2018, then at Yale University on February 22, 2018, and elsewhere. According to Steyerl, Bubble Vision “refers to the markedly disembodied process of viewing the world through a parallel spherical multiverse. She highlighted aesthetics’ current ubiquity by replicating the immersive experience offered by VR, constructing a 360 degrees view of the hypothesis’ pervasiveness in our everyday lives.” See Emily Sasmor at http://topicalcream.info/blog/hito-steyerl-bubble-visionaesthetics-of-isolation-yale/(accessed November 21, 2019)

�See Hito Steyerl, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boMbdtu2rLE (accessed November 21, 2019).

�Anri Sala in conversation with the author, May 2019.

� Anri Sala’s quotes in this essay are excerpted from conversations with the author, which started back in 2002 in view of a possible exhibition at Castello di Rivoli. Further references include the artist’s writings, gathered together and published for the first time in this catalog.