Art Installation
Nati Infiniti
Alessandro Cortini
@sonarlisboa Aftermaths
The Italian artist, Alessandro Cortini, best known for his haunting, atmospheric work as a musician and composer, crafts this site-specific new commission for Sonar Lisboa 2022, a milestone, playground and promise of future explorations.
Curated by Joana Seguro
In his debut installation 'Nati Infiniti’, Alessandro Cortini succeeds in teasing minds and bodies into a reflective and dreamlike experience from which the outside world suddenly subtracts. He morphs the untouched industrial plant, once a flour factory, into a ballet of lights of changing colours in sync with a soundscape specifically conceived for the four floors of The Moagem building.
The exploration is phantasmagoric and intriguing.
Fragments of scenes form in my mind merging reality and fiction. David Lynch's Eraserhead with its post-industrial metronomic metallic noise fade to the white powdered silhouettes emerging from the 9/11 attacks; particles of post-atomic disasters move in the background when Pina Bausch's cluster of dancers enter; Your Blind Passenger tunnel of dense fog, an installation by Olafur Eliasson, rewinds in suffocation to melt onto one of my favoured landscapes, the sky in high altitude upon which floating clouds in levitation stretch in the infinite.
Meanwhile, a girl naps wearing her hair as a curtain under a hoodie. The powdered wig of the monarch and his figurines have lost prestige. The dark ashes of war by autocrats blinding kids' future have regained a moment. The remains of industrial decay and its meander of pipes and pipelines remind us of our dependency.
But here reality is the new fiction on which the artist alike the dictator imposes its playbook. Not with the same intend.
Alessandro Cortini has captured how the layering of sounds, the game of lights, the occupation of a territory, could become a universe on which one can unleash cerebral gameplays. With our loaded memories, the exercise is another form of dance; solo, meditative and internalised. The pipes themselves when turning purple or blue, seem lighter and in motion play the ballerinas.
Cortini alone built a mesmerising and haunting orchestra to trigger our dreams, our fears, our best memories and hidden traumas. Once the bass player of Nine Inch Nails’ Tour “Lights In The Sky Over North/South America”, he brought the lights at the heart of the Port of Lisbon.
A Southern journey of his own.
Images & text by Claudine Boeglin @dandyvagabond
