Andrea Molino - Il senso del luogo - Montepulciano

"Il Senso del Luogo - Montepulciano" is a commission of the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte and was premiered on July 6, 2022 as the opening of its 47th edition in form of an audiovisual installation at the Fortezza Medicea in Montepulciano.

Massimiliano Cuseri and Alessio Tiezzi, keyboards
Marco Ferrari, video shooting and editing
Cosma Castellucci, sound design
Solian Clerici, staging project
Davide Sgalippa, artistic supervision video
in collaboration with the Istituto di musica Hans Werner Henze, Montepulciano and IED - Istituto Europeo di Design, Milan

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“The project was born from a fundamental intuition: that the place where an event takes place is an integral part of the narrative content of the event itself. As I like to say, the context is part of the text.

The five pieces of 'Il senso del luogo - Montepulciano', which continue the experience of 'The Sense of the Place - Dublin' in 2020, were conceived and composed in intimate relation to different places and situations in the city, not in a descriptive way (the pieces do not narrate or represent places) but essentially 'theatrical', in the broadest sense of the term. Moreover, while discussing the project, Mauro Montalbetti asked me to focus on the city's pianos, or rather, keyboards; thus on instruments - objects - that are essentially stable, that are, so to speak, physically part of the urban context. The various moments of the project are thus grafted in different ways into topical locations in the city such as the Teatro Poliziano and Palazzo Contucci with its historic fortepiano; the organs of the Temple of San Biagio, Santa Maria delle Grazie and the Duomo, and the harmonium of the Chiesa del Gesù come together in an impossible quartet; the pianos in some private homes, in counterpoint with those of the Hans Werner Henze Music Institute, delineate the social and cultural fabric of the city; finally, the playful and paradoxical use of a 'toy piano' allows us to touch various open-air locations, including the very heart of the city, Piazza Grande.

The audio-visual language is here a compositional and dramaturgical element in its own right; the video camera also becomes a musical instrument, flanking the pianos with equal dignity and offering them exciting possibilities for articulating the musical and theatrical narrative. In fact, the work is not intended for live performance but for media viewing: at first as a multimedia installation at the Fortezza Medicea, accompanying the Cantiere throughout its journey; later as a series of music videos freely accessible on various digital platforms.”

Paris, May 2022
Andrea Molino