ABYSSAL CREATURES (2023)

Installation and Performance, 30’

[World Premiere]

'Abyssal Creatures' is a project by Francesco Cavaliere following the narrative of a group of creatures from his fantasy writing about Peoples of Glass, that develops in a new saga inspired by the images of the marine flora of the abyss, hybridized with archetypal figures of the human unconscious. These creatures, coagulated on glass, in the form of sound sculptures blown by Murano masters, manifest themselves for the first time in Porto, at the Serralves museum, in an installative and performative dimension. An opportunity to look out onto this artist’s ethereal and fluctuating universe, suspended between alchemy and science-fiction, which relocates knowledge about matter and nature - from botany to crystallography - in a poetic dimension, which goes beyond measured thought.

Abyssal Creatures are an ensemble of Murano glass sculptures, in blown glass, designed to represent other beings, assembled like communicating vessels that form a sounding body, non-bipedal and far from any human representation. These abyssal bodies expand their life through sound and vitreous resonances. The music that flows inside them is like an abstract vascular form, drawing inspiration from the Xylem and the lymphatic systems that some plants possess. The Sound, as an invisible sap makes them alive, lights up their presence. Here is their physiology according to Cavaliere: “The Abyssal Creatures are at the same time musical instruments (both idiophones, such as bells, and aerophones, susceptible to air vibrations) and sculptures that seem to live and sweat noise. The creatures are in different colors, and their cavities, holes and openings are points for a musical cascade. They are like taps to open and close, with which create musical compositions. The floral elements of the sculptures and the curvilinear shapes constitute a set of conical-cylindrical sound resonators, which host sound reproduction and diffusion systems.”

Project supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (2023).

Produced by Xing.