MILANoLTRE -
festival di teatro danza musica e oltre
La città è il mondo è il titolo della XXI edizione di Milanoltre che si svolgerà a Milano, tra Elfo, Dal Verme e Spazio Pim, dal 28 settembre al 14 ottobre. Luca Scarlini, direttore artistico del Festival al suo quarto mandato, ha selezionato sei appuntamenti che offrono uno spaccato della danza e della musica contemporanea.
http://www.milanoltre.org/
Originally trained as an architect, Alexander Schweder (American, born 1970) has turned to making installations and videos that often take architecture as a theme. He created Murmurs from footage that he shot during an American Academy in Rome Fellowship in 2006. That footage has been edited together with a soundtrack produced by Charles Mason, another fellow at the Academy.
For this work, Schweder cropped out the cityscape and instead filmed the tens of thousands of starlings that invade the sky above a Roman suburb each year. Mason recorded the group voice of the flock as well as the singing of single birds then layered, filtered, transposed, expanded, and collaged the sound into the composition that accompanies the images. The setting of the film is the site where Mussolini once planned to hold the Universal Exhibition, his unrealized homage to fascism.
The birds’ behavior becomes Schweder’s medium and, together with the soundtrack, delivers an associative message. “It’s not just about birds,” said Schweder. “It’s about a moment of being overwhelmed, of being caught up in a crowd, of being consumed by something.”
Schweder completed a BA in Architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and an MA in Architecture at Princeton University. He has had solo exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome, Parsons School of Design in New York, and Suyama Space in Seattle. He has participated in group exhibitions at Art Metropole in Toronto, Henry Urbach Architecture in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Rome, and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. Schweder is represented by Howard House Contemporary Art in Seattle.
Murmurs is on view in Gallery 301 from October 2, 2007, through January 6, 2008. The New Media Series is curated by Robin Clark, associate curator of contemporary art.
