Ombre dal Lupercale

On June 21, a fusion of site-specific musical compositions and projected animation drew the public to the banks of the Tiber. Seven artist-composer pairs curated and invited by Kristin Jones transformed the space, while the 12 majestic She-Wolves of Jones’ 2005 frieze, stood guard on the high embankment wall. Each artist and composer worked independently, knowing the visual and sound works would be combined for the evening program on the Solstice. As the sun set, the flames of 1,400 torches (fiaccole) lined the water’s edge. A harmonic choir directed by Roberto Laneri initiated the night-long program of animation and music, eventually culminating at dawn.

Artists were asked to draw on themes of  history, ritual and the present to create evocative She-Wolf animations that re-imagined the symbolic icon in the language of contemporary mythology. The large-scale animated images were projected from across the river, between the wolves of Jones’s frieze. A sound system was designed to resonate throughout the site and composers were challenged to experiment with the existing soundscape of the river.

Click here to listen to Sylvia Poggioli from National Public Radio reporting on Rome’s Tiber River Draws Crowds Once Again.

ANIMATION AND SOUND

Francesca Fini + Roberto Laneri

Francesca Fini: Passeggiata della Lupa Capitolina

Francesca Fini’s 3D digital model of the ancient Etruscan She-Wolf, walked gracefully downstream across the entire embankment wall. The distinct but enigmatic figure of white light became the guardian of the site as she stopped, observed, looked at the sky and moved on.

Roberto Laneri: Flumen

Flumen is a river of sound for an undefined number of voices, divided in three groups. This version was comprised of a group of harmonic singers directed by the author and three solo voices. The score is like an open book, composed of diverse pages of patterns unified by a collection of frequencies. Each page describes different forms of wave movement (eg. Ripples – surface waves, Flussi e Riflussi – deep currents, etc). The director improvises, creating a different composition – a different course of water each time, in relation to the time and place.  – R.L.

Roberto Catani + David Monacchi

Roberto Catani: Anime Lupe

Catani, a traditional animator, presented a collection of haunting, hand-drawn wolf figures that appear as if through water, wavering and dissolving – intangible like the mythological history itself.

David Monacchi: Stati d’acqua

Stati d’Acqua evolves from reflections on the multiple physical states of water. Motion, stasis, evaporation, condensation, rain, are the phases in which water aggregates, giving rise, in its migration, to all forms of life. Water is everywhere – it has shaped the earth by obeying the gravity that extracts it from the mountains and unites it in paths that return to the sea, in a repeated cycle. The Tiber River, in this unique and paradoxical straight stretch, is geometrically contained by embankments that direct its motion, making it concrete and sublime at the same time. When I look out from Ponte Sisto, I cannot help but see the individual raindrops falling on the Apennines, the dance of every single stream rejoining in this mass now slow, inexorable, knowing. This composition is a tribute to the element of water, symbol of the world of emotions, a metaphor for the states of the soul. – D.M.

Kiki Smith with Joey Kötting and Alex Noyes

Kiki Smith (with Joey Kötting): Night Wolf

Kiki Smith renders many wolves and creatures in her creative work, believing that she “becomes part of them as they move through me in the world.”  She returns to the wolf in her work again and again in many forms, including drawings, prints and sculpture. When invited to participate in the project and produce her own animation of a She-Wolf, Smith offered a short sequence of drawings, inspired by the stop-motion series of photographs by Edward Muybridge. The repetitive sequence, re-composed for the Tiber River, shows a reclining wolf as she slowly rises and walks.

Kiki Smith (with Alex Noyes): Wolf’s Dream

The accompanying sound, also created by Smith, wavers and whistles – the wind howls, and dream dissolves.

Maureen Selwood + Alvin Curran

Maureen Selwood (with Maria Vasilkovsky): Protective Nature

Passionate and fluid, Selwood, a leading figure in American independent animation, animates the myth of the origins of Rome. There is a sense of urgency, of pure emotion, where instinct and maternity are saviors. Selwood’s wolf dives into the Tiber to rescue and protect the human babes. Raising her head to the sky, she howls. The work displays a joyous eroticism and buoyant wit that is true to the artist’s style, employing aesthetically simple line drawings in fluid motion.

The piece stems from a feeling about our loss of understanding, what we learn from animals, and the myth of the origins of Rome.  Our interdependence on animals and what we learn from them is integral to this piece. The protective nature of the she wolf and her scent of the children which stimulates her milk is an ancient motherly trait.  The pervasive images throughout Rome of human emotion in its pure states is what has always attracted me to Rome regardless of the religious significance of the narratives. The underlying themes go deeper for me. The wolf is a creature with all its implications for myth and our primitive natures that will last forever. – M.S.

Alvin Curran: Romulus and Remus’s Ruckus II

Curran recreated a sonic river of intermittent sounds, which moved through, over and around the river site – calling, howling, recalling and rebounding on the urban artery, the magnificent river of life. Curran created a soundscape where the “cries of men coming from the Regina Coeli prison” adjacent to the Tiber site and “flocks of swallows feeding in flight at sundown over the river” give rise to the deepest of fog horns and the imagined cries of wolves “Descendents of Romulus and Remus – the city’s mythical founders.”

I have been walking, running and sitting on the banks of the Tiber River for over 40 years.  The Tiber is home, full of murk and ancient memory, garbage, fear, longing and hope. Kristin Jones’ vision is monumental, inspired and akin to my own which gave birth in Rome to some of my well know large-scale environmental sound works.  The sheer coincidence that my very first tiny rented flat in Rome was practically overlooking the site Kristin has chosen for Tevereterno, is remarkable. From my windows and roof terrace I could see the river and hear the agonizing cries of men coming from the Regina Coeli prison; I could also hear their families calling to them at night from atop of the Gianicolo Hill; I could see and hear mammoth flocks of swallows feeding in flight at sundown in the river bed.  I could not hear the wolves, the descendents of Romulus and Remus – the city’s mythical founders, but later I imagined I could. These indelible sounds and memories have simply become part of my musical vocabulary, and in this Solstice event of June 21 2006, I will recreate a sonic river of intermittent sounds in collaboration with the wolf projections of Maureen Selwood which will move through and over and around the half a kilometer long river site, calling, howling, and recalling and rebounding on this ancient urban artery, this ignominious and magnificent river of life. – A.C.

Kristin Jones + Eugenio Giordani

Kristin Jones (with Jee Hyun Yoo + Ji Hyun Song): Wild Graces

Five luminous She-Wolves were chosen from the vector drawings Jones, with Fini, had initially created for a filmic metamorphosis of the icon through time. The drawings were transformed into white light and animated. The figures were researched and inspired by Jones and  were animated in collaboration with Jee Hyun Yoo and Ji Hyun Song. The creatures began to breathe, become aware, look around, and become the living effigies of their mythological history.

Eugenio Giordani: Non spazio, non tempo

Giordani gives “voice” to the enigmatic wolves and pays respect to the river by building an infinite series of elementary sounds, produced through an abstract numeric process that, layered together with recorded sounds, combine in a composition that has no apparent beginning or end, space or time.  The concept of movement and stasis are at play.

Participating with my music in an event so strongly dedicated to the shores of the Tiber River, the eternal witness to the origin and story of the universal myth of the Romans, stirs in me a profound feeling of utmost respect and veneration. In the name of this respect and considering the open-air environment where the work is presented, I decided to use sound without imposing any sonorous “forcing” or obvious form. The mysterious wolves of Kristin Jones, and their intangible motion, prompted me to give them a “voice” without space and without time, for as long as possible without beginning and without end. The work includes an ongoing series of elemental sounds produced from an abstract numeric process, that continuously follow one another and re-combine. They evoke the intangible fluidity of their physical nature, contrasting the concepts of mobility and immobility. The rest is left to the river, the air of this particular evening, the people and chance. – E.G.

Andrea Biagioni and Gabriele Manecchi + Nico Muly

Andrea Biagioni and Gabriele Manecchi: Shepard Wolf

The Roman team of Andrea Biagioni and Gabriele Manecchi contributed painterly scenes of the familiar German Shepard, the domestic creature descended from the feral wolf. The larger-than-life animal is at home on the river. She walks, sleeps, wakes, rises, circles, finds a new position, looks into the viewer’s eye and rests her watchful head on the banks of the river.

Nico Muhly: Obvious

Muhly works with what he considers to be ‘obvious’, with what the river itself suggests: a pulsing, quietly insistent, tingling music with clear harmonic signposts and mysterious, fluid cycles. Pre-recorded voice and instrumental sounds are woven into passing repetitive textures.

I lived in Rome when I was thirteen years old: a proudly transitional time.  Not speaking the language (at first), not knowing anybody (at first), and never having lived in a large city, I allowed myself the pleasure of aimlessly wandering around, hoping desperately to get lost.  Each new street presents its own natural musics, ranging from the self-evident (cars, ambulances, bells) to the discreet (murmuring, bartering, whispering). Although the presence of water is baroquely announced by fountains (I lived just behind the Aqua Paola), the more subtle and constant articulation of water is the Tiber.  Sunk down from the street level, the river suggests a pulsing and quietly insistent music that I am attempting to hint at in this work, Obvious. The straightness of the walls and the formality of the bridges suggests clear harmonic signposts, while the empty, boulevard-like proportions of the water itself demand more mysterious cycles. – N.M.

Daniel K. Brown and Erika Kruger + Walter Branchi

Daniel K. Brown and Erika Kruger: A notte finita

Four Arias integrate the elements of nature – Earth (stone walls), Water (ripples), Fire (sunrise), Air (moon) – with the fifth element, the Spirit of the She-wolf, all becoming one again at dawn.

The four animations are synchronized with the four arias of Walter Branchi’s composition, “Molto presto di mattina,” written expressly to parallel the transition between night and day. Enormous, wild, bright eyes stare from the site, watching intently as Branchi’s music builds form from the air. The eyes are circles that blink; the viewer is aware that the creature is alive and watchful. Reflections of water ripple expanding circles across the animals’ eyes. As the music evolves, the eyelids become heavier and heavier until they nearly close, leaving a white crescent. The crescents evolve into moons, glowing as they grow full and brighter. The moons wane, become dark black, and coronas of light appear from behind the circles’ shadows. Radiating rings of light signal the total solar eclipse. The circles become eyes again as the wolves awake, facing the rising sun. A rosy reflection is seen in the eyes as the sun rises. The reflected light fills the eyes, growing into burning planets of fire. Fiery suns, they dance and burn, slowly vanishing. – D.K.B and E.K.

Walter Branchi: Molto presto di mattina

Branchi, a Roman spiritual idealist and rigorous rebel, continues to challenge the idea of “concert” and listening. His work is timed, conceived and constructed for the hour before sunrise, and builds from somewhere within the atmosphere of air. The work demands listening. It is both transparent and present, from the unfathomable depth of the earth, the sound builds, weaving in and out of the ambient sounds of the river site and slumbering city, birds, traffic and church bells are suspended within an audible force field, building into the coming dawn. Like listening to the approaching light, the music itself ascends; it is like triumphant choir of angels who vanish at the instant of dawn. Simple and powerful, it happens every day: the sunrise.

There is a moment during the night when a transformation of light begins to happen. At twilight from the highest stratosphere of air, there is glow that descends into the earth’s atmosphere preceding sunrise. It is the passage from night to day, the impossible end and beginning. I wanted my music to be present during this extraordinary moment, on the night of the summer Solstice, the shortest day of the year, to begin at the moment when the sun rises at 4:33 lasting for one hour, until 5:34. The music is made up of four arias of varying duration that take place in succession between silences every twenty minutes.

I suggest to the participants of this extraordinary event (extraordinary perhaps because it is normal?) to listen to the whole situation and immerse fully into the light and music; to observe the breath, the scents of dawn, the crescendo of traffic noise and the arrival of the radiant light from the sun that enhances the transparency of things and definitively replaces the night, awakening the city. – W.B.

4:30 Aria fluente come  (8’58”)

“This mirage you see is the sign of earth dissolving in water. This smoke is the sign of water dissolving into fire”.

4:50 Aria tessi e ritessi  (5’21”)

“These fireflies are the sign of fire dissolving into wind. This candle flame is the sign of wind dissolving into consciousness”.

5:10 Aria silene coeli-rosa (5’ 37”)

“This moonlit sky is the sign of consciousness dissolving into luminance”.

5:30 Aria al sole  (4’00”)

“This sunlit sky is the sign of luminance dissolving into radiance”.

The sun rises at 5:34.

Texts drawn from the Tibetan Book of the Dead translated by Robert A. F. Thurman.