Paolo Giudici's Thesis Installation With Soundscape by Andi Spicer At London's Royal College of Art

Paolo Giudici (http://www.usodimare.com/) starts his marathon 8-hour performance at the Royal College of Art today. I've provided the soundscape for the installation. Here some explanation from his programme notes:

Performance (on a weekday, from 9 am to 5 pm, eight hours with short interruptions and a lunch break) in a soundscape: ANDI SPICER, The Bridge of Perati, 2006 for manipulated voice (Paolo Giudici) and electronics. With six CD players, sound system, two desks, two chairs, desk lamp, one writing mat, two letter trays, one paper bin, A4 paper, one fountain pen, one framed photograph (S.Ten. Nevio Artioli, 1941).

My mother's cousin, Second Lieutenant Nevio Artioli, 253rd Company, 3rd Battalion "Val Chiese", 6th Alpine Regiment, 2nd Alpine Division "Tridentina" fell in Belogorje (Russia) on the 20th December 1942, a few days after his twenty-second birthday. "Raising the alarm he saved his company but was shot by a sniper," it was said. Of the 220,000 soldiers sent by Mussolini to support and share Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union 100,000 never came back from the front or the prison camps. It counts as the most tragic military defeat in Italian history.
In 1952 he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Trieste, where he had begun to study economy before joining the army in September 1940, shortly after Italian intervention in the war.
In 1992 his remains were repatriated and buried in his hometown Tarvisio (Italy). I was as old as him, writing my tedious thesis in logic. I was invited to take part at the official ceremony at the war memorial of Redipuglia, but refused to go. I believed he should have been left near the bight of the Don, where he had rested the past fifty years. I believed no ceremony should indirectly celebrate a war of aggression. A few months later I decided to leave my country for good.
Today I dedicate this performance to Nevio as a form of later and private remembrance. More importantly, going through photos and letters forgotten in the basement, I can see something of my life as a student and soldier reflected in his. Something of his Italy reflected in mine at a turning point in history.

Two desks are facing each other. On one desk there is an audio mixer connected to six CD players and one amplifier with four speakers placed on the flour to mark off the space of the performance. The performer enters the space at 9 am of a working day whistling "Sul ponte di Perati". He switches on the sound system and starts playing a choice of the six CDs in Random Play

He then sits at the other desk, switches on the light, takes a sheet of paper from the left letter tray and starts writing "Il mattino ha l'oro in bocca". This is the Italian translation of the German proverb "Die Morgenstunde hat Gold in Munde" (literally: "The morning hour has gold in its mouth") but has also been used as Italian translation of "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy". The performer continues to replay different CDs and to rewrite the sentence, introducing limited elements of variation. With the passing of the day the sentence appears to gradually consume its own meaning.
Finally, the performer puts the fountain pen back into his pocket, switches off the light, takes the written sheets from the tray and throws them into the bin. He then does the same with the CDs, switches of the sound system and leaves.

Paolo Giudici, THESIS (2006)
A performance in a soundscape by Andi Spicer

is taking place within:

INTERVENTIONS/SPECULATIONS/FUCK-UPS
Installation and Performance work by MA Photography, RCA

Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Art, Stevens Building, Jay Mews Entrance
Thursday 18th May 2006, From 9 am to 5 pmI wish to thank Andi Spicer for preparing this ghostly soundscape essential to the performance. He recorded me while singing or reading "Il ponte di Perati" a WWII Alpine Troops song, censored by the fascist regime for its black realism. He then manipulated and mixed the recordings to create several tracks grouped in six CDs. He finally asked me to play the tracks using the random play mode of the players but making decisions on which combination of CDs to play. To quote Werner Meyer-Eppler: "aleatoric processes are such processes which have been fixed in their outline but the details of which are left to chance."