LIEVITI Podcast
lieviti
The podcast series LIEVITI is part of Living Room, the digital programme dedicated to culture and contemporary art curated by Manifattura Tabacchi.
living room
During this slow return to the world we once knew, life’s rhythm has become intertwined with time spent waiting. Meanwhile, we bake bread as if it were going out of style, like Penelope weaving her tapestry. It is a return to our roots: flour, water, and yeast (provided we can find these ingredients on raided supermarket shelves…). The 6-episode podcast series LIEVITI is a moment in which we can reflect upon today’s themes. Generative yeasts, nutrients, victuals, food for thought to consume slowly.
A succession of six themes – Space, Nature, Time, Body, Identity, and Community – and one work of art per episode will serve as catalysts to provoke reflections and questions of varying complexity: how does our perception of the present change when the mind cannot envision a future? How do our inner and outer landscapes change, what sounds do they make? How does our body change when influenced by digital platforms? Will we ever go back to holding hands? How do we perceive others in times of social austerity?
Artists, experts, and researchers will join us in these discussions: we invite you to listen with us, to tune in to the frequencies of the world yet to come.
Episode 1 / SPACe
The first episode of Lieviti is dedicated to the theme of ‘space’ and examines the series Activities with Dobromierz by KwieKulik. It recounts the changes occuring in the perception and ways of occupying the home — a space which both protects us and isolates us — as we experience the hypermediation of work and free time. In these times of digital sanitization and social austerity, we also follow photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s latest reportage: Galimberti, who was in Milano during the first weeks of the quarantine, asked people to pose in front of their homes, capturing images both intimate and distant.
Artwork:
a shot from the Activities with Dobromierz (Działania z Dobromierzem) series, 1972-74, by KwieKulik.
The participating guests are Tiziano Bonini, professor of Media Sociology at the Università di Siena and Italian photojournalist Gabriele Galimberti. In recent years, Galimberti has traveled all over the world to work on many different photo documentary projects, several of which have been published as books (Toy Stories, In Her Kitchen, My Couch Is Your Couch and The Heavens).
Tiziano Bonini
(a 2008 graduate of the Università di Siena with a PhD in Media, Communications and Public Affairs) is an associate professor of the Sociology of cultural and communicative processes in the Department of Social, Political, and Cognitive Sciences at the Università di Siena. He works in the fields of radio, social media, digital culture and audience studies. Bonini started working in radio as a university student, and continued working for Radio Popolare, Radio2 Rai and Radio Svizzera Italiana. He also worked as a freelance author for Rai Radio 2 and Radio24. He currently writes for the programs Che Fare and Doppiozzero.
Gabriele Galimberti
Gabriele Galimberti is an Italian photographer. He has spent the last few years working on long-term documentary photography projects around the world, some of which have become books, such as Toy Stories, In Her Kitchen, My Couch Is Your Couch and The Heavens. Gabriele is working on both solo and shared projects, as well as on assignments for international magazines and newspapers such as National Geographic, The Sunday Times, Stern, Geo, Le Monde, La Repubblica and Marie Claire.
His pictures have been exhibited in shows worldwide. In Milan, in the first days of lockdown, he asked some people to pose behind a window or behind a door, portraying them in that space between domestic intimacy and social distancing.
episode 2 / nature
Is it true that nature is already reclaiming its space?
The second episode of Lieviti is dedicated to the theme of nature and uses Jana Winderen’s audio research as a starting point. We question how these long weeks of limited mobility — where many of us are almost entirely home-bound — influence our perception of the ‘natural environment’. Biologist Filippo Ferrantini guides us through the maze of environmental assessments between anthropization and the natural environment. Later in the episode, we travel with artist Elena Mazzi to Iceland, rice fields in Piemonte, to Etna and to the Argentinian Patagonia, as we explore the surprising horizons of art, image, and eco-activism with art critic Filipa Ramos.
The Noisiest Guys on the Planet, Jana Winderen
Sounds by Jana Winderen (courtesy Touch)
Fieldrecording from the archives (feat. Giulio Aldinucci)
Voices Carola Haupt, Cristiano Magi, Filippo Ferrantini, Filipa Ramos, Elena Mazzi, Jana Winderen.
The Listener, Jana Windern
Elena Mazzi
Elena Mazzi, artist. Her work explores the relationship between humans and the environment in which we live and the way in which we decide to act in it, which necessarily generates changes. Following a predominantly anthropological approach, Mazzi’s analysis investigates and documents an identity that is at once personal and collective, related to a specific territory which creates various forms of exchange e transformation.
Filippo Ferrantini
Filippo Ferrantini is a marine biologist and environmental expert. He is co-founder ERSE (Ecological Research and Services for the Environment).
Filipa Ramos
Filipa Ramos is a Portuguese art critic and writer who is based in London. Interested in the rapport between contemporary art and cinema, her research mainly explores the relationships between moving images and environmental issues, particularly the representation of the dynamics established between humans, the environment, animals, and machines.
Filipa is the curator of Art Basel Film. She is a professor at the MRes Art: Moving Image program at the Central Saint Martins university in London, and at the Arts Institute of the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz in Basel.
episode 3 / time
Poised between intuition and calculation, experience and control, the nature of time is perhaps the greatest of all mysteries. It is a mystery which concerns what we are, more than it concerns the universe. Does a time outside of us exist, or is it a construct of our cultural and social conventions? Why do we calculate time?
The third episode of Lieviti reflects on these questions, using the One Year Performance series by Tehching Hsieh as a starting point. We explore the use and control of time, the relationship between time, work, rest, and technology, accompanied by the artist Danilo Correale and Davide Calonico, physicist and time metrologist.
Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance, 1980 – 1981, 16mm film, time cards, photographs, time clock
Voices Ilaria Gadenz, Tehching Hsieh [interviewed FACT, for the 2010 Liverpool Biennial], Danilo Correale, Davide Calonico, Tommaso, Giorgina and Giovanni.
Field recordings from the archives.
Music from Les Mondes Imaginaires by Francesco Giannico for Time Released Sound.
Danilo Correale
Danilo Correale (1982) is an Italian artist and researcher based in New York and Naples. His work analyses several aspects of human life, such as work, leisure and sleep, using reflections on time and the human body as starting points. He received an MFA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA in Milan and has taken part in numerous residency programs in Europe and the United States. In 2017, Correale won a Research Affiliate Fellowship at Columbia University in New York. His film Diranno che li ho uccisi io was selected as one of the winning projects at the first edition of the Italian Council competition in 2017.
Danilo Correale, At works end.
Davide Calonico, physicist and Metrology PhD, is a researcher at the National Institute of Metrological Research (INRIM) in Turin, where he develops atomic clocks based on laser cooling and deals with high precision time and frequency measurements for primary metrology and the study of fundamental physics. He co-authored the first Italian atomic clock, a laser-cooled cesium fountain, contributing to the generation of International Atomic Time. He is the Italian representative for time and frequency at the European Metrology Association.
Tehching Hsieh was born in 1950 in Nan-Chou, Taiwan. He arrived in the United States in 1974, where he lived as an illegal immigrant until 1988, when he was granted amnesty. Since the late 1970s, Hsieh has produced five One Year Performances and the Thirteen Year Plan, which ended on December 31, 1999. In the overlap between art and life, his work is considered one of the most radical in contemporary performance. His work has been exhibited internationally since 2009. In 2017, he represented Taiwan at the 57th Venice Biennale.
www.tehchinghsieh.com
episode 4 / body
A body is a material object that is extended in space. The interaction of various bodies creates a system. This is the basic definition of ‘Body’ in physics.
What about our own body? How far does the human body extend in a context of social distancing and contact mediated by technology? Can the borders of our body be determined by a screen?
Lieviti does not answer these complex questions, but takes Allan Kaprow’s How to make a happening as a catalyst for discussions on the confines between the body and public space, physicality and contact. This episode will touch upon art, science and philosophy and features a guest artist who places the body at the center of her research, Maria Pecchioli. Another special guest is the experimental physicist, Christoph Stampfer.
Voices Allan Kaprow [Ubu Web archive], Elisa Giomi, Maria Pecchioli, Anna Raimondo, Christoph Stampfer
Field Recordings from the archives
Music Pamela Z, fragments from The Six Healing Sound – Plotting the Urban Body by Maria Pecchioli
Listening exercise created by Anna Raimondo
Maria Pecchioli
Maria Pecchioli, artist. Pecchioli employs multiple aesthetic languages in her work, thereby constructing an awareness based on participation and building and caring for the community. She is co-founder and member of the artistic and curatorial duo Radical Intention (2009) and the Fosca collective (2006). As of 2010, Pecchioli is the manager of the Corniolo Art Platform, an interdisciplinary space for artist residencies.
mariapecchioli.com
Christoph Stampfer
Christoph Stampfer, physicist. Professor of experimental physics at the 2nd Institute of Physics at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. His focus is on 2-D materials.
Anna Raimondo
Anna Raimondo, artist. Raimondo’s research explores listening as an aesthetic and political experience, treating sound as a tool for creating relational spaces. In her most recent work, Raimondo extended radio performances to installations in public spaces, understood both as physical locations and as locations appertaining to the ‘public sphere’.
annaraimondo.com
radio papesse
Radio Papesse is an online audio archive devoted to contemporary art; it is a place for the documentation and the articulation of a critical discourse around the visual arts and at the same time it is a radio platform dedicated to sound art, experimental sound and radiophonic production and distribution. It has embraced radio as a medium and as a language to communicate art making today. Founded in 2006, Radio Papesse is curated by Ilaria Gadenz and Carola Haupt and since 2011 it’s hosted by Villa Romana, in Florence.
radio papesse