SOL INVICTUS: Sounds and Performances for the Winter Solstice
A project by Istituto Svizzero
MACRO – Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma
#Supplement
On Friday, 16 December, from 7 pm to midnight, MACRO is collaborating with the Swiss Institute by hosting the roman stage of SOL INVICTUS: Sounds and Performances for the Winter Solstice to celebrate the winter solstice together.
Courtesy of the artist
Bit-Tuner live, 2022
Catol Teixeira, © edenleviam
PRICE. Image © Anja Wille Schori
REST by Michele Rizzo, Triennale Milano, 2022. Photo © Matt Ruffolo
This is the shortest day of the year and by convention, the time to which corresponds, because of the position the Sun has relative to the equator, the longest night and the shortest day. An astronomical event rich in symbolic meanings – sometimes even controversial – that was celebrated in antiquity by pagan populations before the advent of Christianity: the Romans, celebrated Sol Invictus, the Egyptians the birth of Horus, the Greeks worshipped Helios. After the prevailing hours of winter darkness, the Sun seemed to be reborn and became invincible (from Latin Sol Invictus). A time of year that, ancestrally, marks the passage from darkness to light. And it is precisely to the search for light, for the divine that is in the air, for the myth and the beauty of nature that Istituto Svizzero revolves these three evenings of movement and sound experimentation.
The program, curated by Gioia Dal Molin, is developed through performance, movement, sound and light. Performance interventions will alternate throughout the evening: REST by Michele Rizzo, I Try My Tongue (sequences) by PRICE and notes on licking, Rome by Carol Teixeira & Sandar Tun Tun and sounds: Bit-Tuner’s live set and Mary Gehnyei’s listening session.
Booking is recommended, register here.
MICHELE RIZZO (1984) is an Italian artist based in Amsterdam. He studied choreography at the SNDO School for New Dance Development, and later visual arts at the Dirty Art Department Master program of the Sandberg Institute. Rizzo has produced works for theaters and exhibition spaces, engaging the aesthetic translation of aspects of club culture and raving. In 2018 Rizzo presents HIGHER xtn. at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which has welcomed the work in its permanent collection. In 2020 Rizzo establishes his practice as a visual artist, bringing forward his choreographic language and implementing in it the medium of sculpture, producing Rest (2020), presented at the Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma and acquired by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. In 2021 Rizzo produces his latest performance work Reaching at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, in collaboration with Julia Stoschek Collection. Rizzo also produced and directed the film Rest (2021), acquired by the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum. Since 2020 Rizzo engages in the fashion world and as a lecturer and tutor in various art education institutions.
CAROL TEIXEIRA is a dance performer based in Geneva. They worked as an interpreter for dance and circus groups and studied contemporary dance at La Manufacture (Lausanne), Sead (Salzburg), Roar (Berlin). Their dance creations were shown at Belluard Festival, Santarcangelo, La Friche Belle de Mai, Gessneraelle, Theatre de l’Usine, among others spaces. Catol’s work is a constant practice of time-space perception, they keep searching for choreographic methods that challenge notions of what a body can be. They keep constructing and researching different performance formats in collaboration with artists and friends.
SANDAR TUN TUN build their work around fabulation, new alliances and collaborative trajectories. Artist, researcher, and composer, they develop a sonic, spatial and performative practice focused on listening as a critical and sensitive responsiveness. Drawing on the social space of music and its transgressive perspectives their projects explore ways of reverence or interversion to inhabit dissonance, fragmentation and noise. Their research focuses on the modalities of transmission within aural cultures and engineered narratives, the space of appearance/disappearance, the relationship between technology and spirituality.
PRICE‘s work is characterised by elaborate soundscapes, costumes and stage design often developed in collaborative constellations. His productions play with the audience’s expectations of the exposed, ostensibly authentic self of the performer, who emotes before their eyes. They are interspersed with pop-cultural set pieces, mechanical sounds, rhythms and his own singing voice. The voice forms a central element of his work. PRICE views it as an acoustic form of emotional communication outside language’s imperative to create meaning.
BIT-TURNER, Born and raised in St.Gallen, works and lives in Zurich today. He’s been producing electronic music with computers, mpcs, synthesizers, bass guitars and a fleet of analogue effect gear. He has a fondness for samples from old records, movies and has also been discovering field recording. Bit-Tuner works with heavy beats, blown up bass sounds, gloomy athmospheres, acid-driven melodies and uproaring soundscapes. His musical field of expression reaches from Experimental Hip-Hop to Electronica, from Bass Music to Noise, Theatre Productions, Fashion Shows and Shortfilm Soundtracks. His continuous work is widely recognized, which led to him being nominated for the renowned Swiss Music Prize in 2015, alongside artists like Bruno Spoerri, Joy Frempong (OY), Joke Lanz and Nik Bärtsch. Bit-Tuner has collaborated with various international artists. Live he has shared the stages with Acts like Kelpe, Jon Hopkins, Otto von Schirach, Ben Frost, Jimi Tenor, Modeselektor, Shackleton, Actress, The Haxan Cloak, Zomby, and more.
MARY GEHNYEI, born in Rome of Liberian descent, began her musical adventure as a vocalist in some of the best clubs in Italy (Goa Club in Rome, Redzone in Perugia, Metropolis in Naples) performing alongside DJs such as Tony Humphries, Roger Sanchez, Deadmau5 and many others. She then joined the film industry working as assistant costume designer for several directors, such as Michele Placido, Sergio Rubini and Marco Bellocchio. In the process she amateurishly collects vinyls, with which she discovers she has a much stronger bond: from simply buying them, she moved on to an ongoing quest to be able to play them and share them. Thus was born Mary Gehnyei, a female DJ with an interesting and eclectic musical background, where various influences converge, from Hip Hop to Detroit Techno. She has had the opportunity to compare and challenge herself by doing warm ups to DJs such as like Andrew Weatherall, and K-Hand. In 2020 she was hired as the official DJ of two sports companies, VIRGIN ACTIVE and VIRTUS ROMA Basketball.