2017
Long Night Talks è un progetto realizzato da Roberto Paci Dalò durante il suo soggiorno a Vienna presso Tonspur – Q21/MQ MuseumsQuartier, nel luglio 2017. L’opera è dedicata a Robert Adrian (Toronto, 1935 – Vienna, 2015), artista canadese noto per la sua ricerca sul rapporto tra i media tradizionali e le nuove tecnologie. Long Night Talks nasce dall’esperienza delle intense e ipnotiche conversazioni che Roberto Paci Dalò e Robert Adrian erano soliti intrattenere nel suo studio viennese. Il progetto ne evoca la dimensione notturna e sospesa, trasformando il dialogo, la memoria e l’ascolto in una composizione audiovisiva.

L’opera è costituita da 8 canali audio e 7 immagini. I visitatori della Tonspur_passage, uno spazio audio multicanale all’interno del MuseumsQuartier di Vienna, intraprendono un iaggio attraverso la voce di Robert Adrian. In Long Night Talks, infatti, Roberto Paci Dalò lavora sulla voce dell’amico, che da materia primordiale esplode in mille vibrazioni strumentali e oscillazioni elettroniche. Accanto al lavoro sonoro, l’artista, evocando le conversazioni notturne, realizza una serie di disegni che rappresentano le costellazioni di un vasto cielo notturno. I disegni sono sette, a simboleggiare le notti di un’immaginaria settimana trascorsa con Adrian nel suo studio viennese di Wiednerhauptstraße. Il cielo notturno è anche una partitura grafica.

Nightly conversations with Robert Adrian

Paci Dalò’s work is dedicated to Robert Adrian (Toronto, 1935 – Vienna, 2015), an artist known for his experimental works that mix different media, from the most traditional to new technologies and telecommunications. The Canadian artist lived in Vienna until 1972 and his contribution to the world of art is shown by a significant retrospective of his successes at the Kunsthalle Wien. For more than twenty years Roberto Paci Dalò and Robert Adrian cultivated a deep friendship, working side by side in several projects, including a film specially created for the great retrospective of Adrian. The two used to sit in Adrian’s studio in Wiednerhauptstrasse and share long evening talks discussing passionately about art, radio, broadcast, technology, web, sound, war and conflict. As Roberto Paci Dalò says to “Artribune”: “Robert Adrian, together with the painter James Rosen and the composer John Cage were my main teachers. Friends, colleagues and inspirers in New York, Canada and Austria”. He adds: “I shared Long Night Talks with Adrian for over 25 years. In my travels to Vienna, I used to live in his studio in the Wiednerhauptstrasse and our endless nocturnal conversations – both sitting in front of computers – have carried me vortically into a world of art, media, technology, telecommunication systems, radio, internet. I’m not a nocturnal person, so many times I listened in a kind of sleep-wake and in the flow phrases and single words materialized at times. In my work I wanted to evoke this sensorial dreamtime”.

An installation of sounds and visions

For his sound and visual installation, the Italian sound artist mainly used a conversation with Adrian. This conversation was recorded for an exhibition that the city of Vienna dedicated to the Canadian artist at the Kunsthall Wien in 2001, a circumstance for which Paci Dalò himself made a short film. The grain of Adrian’s voice accompanies the series of seven drawings that the Italian artist has created by conceiving them as a constellation. On the day of the inauguration of Long Night Talks, the radio work of the same name, lasting almost an hour, is broadcast on Ö1 Kunstradio. This radio work is generated from the same materials as the installation, but redesigned in a radically different way.