THE SOUND OF NORMALISATION

Posted in music, research, Sound on January 30th, 2025
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Pictures of the moon, the ultimate topos in photography, have been given a new twist in Erik Steinbrecher’s MONDFOTOGRAFIE. The Swiss artist collects pictures of the moon and rephotographs

The project THE SOUND OF NORMALISATION is a collection of audio recordings that documents the sound culture of the Ultras group BRESCIA 1911 in relation to modern football and the wave of repressive measures targeted at organized supporters groups. The recordings were taken over a period of 15 years and cover: 1) creation, uses and meanings of the chants 2) group principles and collective identity 3) audience participation and the process of social exclusion from the stadium 4) police repression and the political implications of the chants 5) the evolution of the drumming in relation to the drums ban-order of 2007. Each recording comes with a short introductory text and is presented as a video with subtitles. The work has been published in 2018 by SARU, Oxford Brookes University.

Since early 2000 Tidoni has been researching football supporter subculture, audience participation and crowd regulation. The overall research concerns the nexus of public space, social performance and surveillance in contemporary Italian football.

The aim of the research is to trace mechanisms of social interaction and aesthetic creation in football supporters’ subculture via an examination of the sound practices shared by the group Brescia 1911. Relations between sound production and space construction are investigated especially in the light of dynamics of social control adopted in football grounds in the last years.

The research contributes to a better understanding of sound’s function in group formation and collective identity as well as how sound performance and social repertoire evolve in relation to public security measures and space control.

In 2015, a first concrete materialization of the project has been exhibited at ARGOS, centre for art and media, Brussels. In 2018, the final version of the project has been presented at GET SOME CHALK ON YOUR BOOTS! an exhibition and conference organized by SARU at Oxford Brookes University.

Author: Davide Tidoni

Publisher: SARU and VIAINDUSTRIAE SUONO

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Il Gambero Cosmografico 1965, Il Granchiolino Immamorato 1967 1968-2018

Posted in poetry, Sound on March 10th, 2024
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Henri Chopin (18 June 1922 – 3 January 2008) was a French avant-garde poet and musician: he is widely considered to be a pioneer in the recognition and distribution of sound-poetry. Besides poetry and music, his practice includes paining, graphic design, typography, independant publishing and filmmaking; Chopin’s work is a barometer of the shifts in European media between the 1950s and the 1970s.
In 1964 he created OU, one of the most notable reviews of the second half of the 20th century, and he ran it until 1974. OU’s contributors included William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Gil J Wolman, François Dufrêne, Bernard Heidsieck, John Furnival, Tom Phillips, and the Austrian sculptor, writer and Dada pioneer Raoul Hausmann.

Chopin spent a lot of time in Naples from the beginning of the 1980s due to his collaborative projects with Peppe Morra, founder of Fondazione Morra, one of the most renowned spaces for contemporary art active within the city. Morra and Chopin worked closely together up until the final years of the French artist’s life. During this time they produced numerous publications, a large number of which were based on his stunning production of “typewriter poems”. Chopin found a new possibility for poetry both within sound and the written form; with a formal approach he constructed a new alphabetical narration that actually had no responsibility for communication.
His personal production — consisting of typewriter-poems and sound performances — is an inspired attempt to open the medium of poetry into a form described by Chopin as ‘a poetry of spaces’: demonstrating ‘the sensory superiority of sound as opposed to normal speech, and […] free man from the straightjacket of words and letters and from his obedience to didactics.’

This book contains a text by Stelio Maria Martini.

Author: Henri Chopin

Publisher: Edizioni Morra

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