Repetition–(Loops)–Return

~~ Repetition 1 ~~

There’s a certain physicality that I’m interested in, with performing. Especially with sound, and this idea of sculpting it… Something I’m very engaged in and interested in is this idea that you can move air around a room, and that property has great force and presence. You know? And up here, it’s vibrations of air and radiant light. ~ Marco Fusinato

A guitar shrieks ~ piercing, physical sound ~ disintegrates into static ~ recombining ~ weighty ~ coalescing into a distorted pulse, like the wash of an enormous wave dragging slow and relentless back to sea ~ dragging bodies with it.

Another wailing riff vibrates out like a thunderclap. Music as a force of nature. It’s the feeling of standing on a sea cliff in a storm ~ a terrifying elation ~ a consciousness of one’s smallness in the face of untameable forces. Standing on the edge of one’s life and the world ~ face-to-face with the churning beyond.

If I close my eyes, it’s like I’m spinning inside a wave ~ or caught in an avalanche, pummelled on all sides ~ vibrating to my core.

But I can’t look away. Projected before me are a series of images ~ fascinating, terrifying, disgusting, sublime ~ flashing and following each other in unsteady rhythm ~ disconnected, hypnotic ~ a tarot card, a tooth, a mountaintop ~ a cracked sidewalk, a dead body ~ fleeting nightmares in the blink of an eye, as dizzying as the sound that pulverises me.

My ears adjust, picking out sparks of light among the distorted waves. Crashing water, shattering glass. As space ~ negative presence ~ floods into the music, the strobing images slow down. I linger with them ~ a lonely tree ~ a snake poised to strike ~

~~ Return 1 ~~

Leaving the pavilion is like coming out of a dream. Or perhaps waking into a different dream. The contrast is disorienting. The sun warms my skin through the cool autumn air, and I walk down to sit by the canal, squinting my eyes at the turquoise water that laps against the stone steps. A gentle rhythm of waves, the chugging boat fading out towards the lagoon ~ soft sounds that only accentuate the sense of silence outside in the garden.

This is my first time at the Venice Biennale, though I know the city somewhat. My family is from this part of the world ~ my nonna was born on the side of Monte Grappa, some sixty-odd kilometres inland. The first hill of the Alps ~ on a clear day you can see it from the coast, rising like a wall out of the pianura, the wide plain crossed by the rivers that feed the lagoon.

Venice is fabled for its wealth and romance. For over half a millennium it controlled the Mediterranean; today it’s a playground for A-listers and insta-fluencers. But for most of the 19th and 20th centuries it was the capital of one of the poorest regions of Italy. The fall of La Serenissima ~ the ‘Most Serene Republic of Venice’ ~ was followed by its incorporation first into the Austrian Empire, and then the Kingdom of Italy. Not so long ago, my forebears lived in almost feudal conditions as contadini ~ sharecroppers ~ and day-labourers, and their once-proud language, Veneto, had become considered a dialect of the ‘proper’ Italian spoken in Florence and Rome. This sense of deprivation, compounded by the destruction of two world wars, led many Veneti to emigrate at the first chance they could, as my grandparents did to Australia.

I’m here to meet Marco Fusinato, who is performing his improvisation-installation Desastres at the Australian pavilion in the Biennale’s giardini. Marco’s parents were born on the opposite side of Monte Grappa from my nonna; they spoke the same dialect (at least to my ears ~ a local could tell within a few words which side of the mountain someone was from). The Fusinatos, too, migrated to Australia, joining a diaspora of Veneti who became renowned for their relentless work ethic, grateful to build a new life, yet burdened by a nostalgia for the landscapes and the loved ones left behind.

~~ Loops 1 ~~

Desastres is a monumental installation, both in terms of time as well as space. A cinematic screen occupies the entire back wall of the pavilion ~ stroboscopic images flash in black and white. Fusinato sits off to the side, half-hidden behind a stack of amplifiers, his back to the audience as he works intently at his guitar and effects rack. He pours forth a surging flow of improvised noise, and will continue to do so every moment the pavilion is open ~ eight hours a day, six days a week ~ throughout the 200 days of the Biennale.

Fusinato’s guitar is connected to the projector via an intricate, AI-powered setup. The machine responds to the music, selecting and shifting images based on the tempo and amplitude of his playing. Fusinato’s own playing is then informed by what he sees ~ as well as what he hears, and by what’s happening in the space ~ creating vast and interlocked feedback loops between man, instrument, machine and environment.

The machine is a big part of it and I’m trying to control that, but it controls me… I’m improvising into it, but then, it’s telling me certain things, you know? ~ M.F.

Fusinato tells me that, like many improvisors, even a solo performance has a dialogical quality for him. Listening and playing all at once, he hears his own music as an independent entity, pushing him in directions he couldn’t foresee. Immersed in the swirl of sound and light, he develops his sensitivity to the shimmering spectra.

I have certain kinds of movements I’m exploring up here. But sometimes I’ll just sit on one. And other days I might try two. And then I’ll take it somewhere, and here’s something I haven’t heard before. And then I’ll go down that path, of kind of going into detail with it.

Every day’s like that… This is the thing where, eight hours a day, 200 days, you can really focus on detail, and really explore minutiae. Of something that happened by chance. That’s been the real highlight for me, having the time and space to really explore deeply something that may have happened just through improvising… ~ M.F.

The music’s autonomy is augmented by sustain and by loop pedals ~ sound lingers longer than the string’s vibration, becoming a dynamic object that Fusinato explores by listening, probing and sculpting with sonic reactions.

And again, it’s telling me, ‘Hey ~ I’ve taken you here.’ And, you know, the most important part of this is listening. Not playing, but listening. I think that’s important when improvising too. ~ M.F.

~~ Return 2 ~~

Monte Grappa looms in the collective memory of this region, as the site of some of the bloodiest battles of World War I. If you hike up to the plateau, where the gold-speckled beeches give way to dark-needled pines, you may find the lonely plaque that stopped me, saying: ‘O traveller, trampling the soil of this mountain, never forget that you find yourself in a grand cemetery.’ Even today, it’s not unusual to find scraps of metal ~ rusting shells, helmets, bayonets ~ or even fragments of bone, brought to the surface as the weather shifts the soil.

The first times I visited, the wars belonged to living memory. Uncles and aunts would fall silent when the songs from those times came on the radio. Once, at a commemoration high on the cliffside, an Austrian delegation was invited to share the solemnity and recognise the peace that now joined old enemies. One old man, who’d lived his whole life in the valley, left trembling and in tears, buried trauma triggered by the German accents he couldn’t understand.

If I didn’t know these stories, would I guess at the destruction? I climb old mulepaths through green tunnels of hornbeam, beech, oak, and feel myself in an idyll. Swept up in the melody of birdsong, the percussive scampering of roe deer, I feel almost entirely removed from the world of humans ~ of cities, nations and states. Then I turn a corner, and a vista opens up of the pianura, 1,500 metres below, stretching out towards Venice on the horizon, and the sparkling sea.

~~ Loops 2 ~~

Desastres is an open-ended improvisation, and an unstable repetition. Fusinato’s actions loop back on fractal scales, both instantaneously and extended over long stretches. His loop pedal brings sounds around again and again in real-time, sounds that are incorporated with his next movements into the evolving piece. The piece itself evolves over the hours and the days. From up close and inside, no two slices of the improvisation are the same ~ even deliberate sonic repetitions are re-contextualised by the stream of images, the processing crowds, the shifting mood of the city as summer’s suffocating humidity gives way to the autumn winds. But as the seasons progress, the performance develops its own rhythms. Pausing each evening, reawakening each morning ~ like the solar circle it repeats without returning. Visitors ebb and flow in waves, as predictable and uneven as the tides.

It’s not like a gig where you come and you sit or stand for thirty minutes or an hour. This is very much like a sculpture, an object in a room. So people come in, float around, go straight out… some choose to stay longer than others. ~ M.F.

The machine cycles through images, channelling the music through its own internal logic. Stare for long enough, and you start to find patterns in the randomness. Noise to signal to noise to signal to noise. Desastres is the gestalt ~ more than the experience itself ~ like a thunderstorm stretching over a landscape. Localised at every perspective, it’s more than our senses can take in. We share an experience, but we attune to different elements. No one sees or hears exactly the same thing.

~~ Repetition 2 ~~

Fusinato made his name in the experimental improvised music scene ~ a small and somewhat abstract niche, dispersed across the world in underground clubs and studios. I spend most of my time writing about improvisation at the University of Vienna ~ an even more abstract gig. Equally strange places to find the sons of contadini. But perhaps stranger still is this garden in the sun by the silent canal ~ the heart of the global arts-industrial complex.

An hour’s drive north, on the slopes of Monte Grappa, the Biennale barely registers. Some of the weirder exhibits or popular celebrities might get a mention or two on the TV news over the summer, but few folks will take notice regardless. There are more important things to do. In summer the forest will be full of berries, and mushrooms will spring out with the rain. Then the undergrowth needs clearing, so that gathering the chestnuts will be easier when they fall in the autumn.

~~ Return 3 ~~

Diasporas are not one-way journeys; human movement is rarely just ‘here’ to ‘there.’ The composer and scholar of improvisation George E. Lewis prefers to talk about polyasporas. People migrate, often with little or no choice. They arrive, they linger, they move on, they return. Families, or even individuals, find they have grown roots, unexpectedly ~ perhaps even unwillingly ~ in more than one place. We recognise ourselves in places we have never visited; we become strangers in our own land. Human history is a history of movement. Along the way, we change and are changed by where we’ve been. Like a piece of music, new sounds change the shape, drive it forward. And yet something repeats ~ it is the same piece, even if we no longer remember how it started.

This is an excerpt. Read the full piece in Dark Mountain: Issue 28, available now.

TOP IMAGE:

Ackroyd & Harvey
Dilston Grove 2003
Seedling grass, clay, water, light
Sound by Graeme Miller
Former Clare College Mission Church, Southwark Park, London Commissioned by LIFT in co-production with Café Gallery Projects and Artsadmin (photo © The Artists)

Dark Mountain: Issue 28

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world

 

Read more