Brian Eno for Trentino: two installations by the artist in the castles of Trentino in August

From 19 August to 6 November at the Castello del Buonconsiglio and Castel Beseno

Brian Eno - photo © Shamil Tanna

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (better known as Brian Eno), composer, producer, visual artist and activist, gained international notoriety in the early 1970s as a founding member of the British band RoxyMusic. Numerous solo albums and collaborations with other artists followed. His work as a producer includes albums with Talking Heads, Devo, U2, Laurie Anderson, Nico, Marianne Faithfull, James and Coldplay, and his long list of collaborations includes recordings with David Bowie, Jon Hassell, Harold Budd, John Cale, David Byrne, Grace Jones, Karl Hyde and James Blakee. Most recently, with his brother Roger, on Mixing Colors (Deutsche Grammophon, 2020).

His experiments with light and video run parallel to his extraordinary musical career, with exhibitions and installations all over the world from the Venice Biennale to Ritan Park in Beijing, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Marble Palace in St Petersburg, from the Arcos da Lapa in Rio de Janiero to the sails of the Sydney Opera House.

Art goes hand in hand with commitment: Brian Eno is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation  , a trustee of Client Earth  and patron of Videre Est Credere . And in April 2021 he launched  Earth Percent  to raise money from the music industry and donate it to organisations that combat climate change with evidence of impact.

A true icon of international contemporary culture, Eno is one of the most significant artists of our time. Starting from an idea of art as a form of expression capable of interacting with the environment and the spectator, he uses different media to merge music and figurative arts, creating veritable "soundscapes" in which to immerse the spectator.

Using displays, constantly moving images and loudspeakers, he creates a combinatorial game with infinite variations of shapes, lights and sounds, where not everything is always as it appears and everything changes imperceptibly, as in life, in a random and inexorable way.

In this vein, and picking up on the suggestions of the spaces of the thirteenth-century Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trento, with its splendid Magno Palazzo Gardens and Cortile dei Leoni, Brian Eno will create the Audio Installation for Buonconsiglio (from 19 August to 6 November): a site-specific audio installation consisting of works conceived and created on the basis of the spaces that will host them, to create a dynamic flow of sounds. Installed at key points in the castle and integrated into them, these works of generative music will interact with the surrounding environments; they will accompany visitors along a tour that, superimposed on the museum's exhibition, will offer a unique and unrepeatable synaesthetic listening experience.

While the Buonconsiglio Castle will be the venue for sound installations, the Beseno Castle will be the scene of a spectacular large-scale audiovisual installation: 77 Million Paintings for Beseno. Brian Eno has in fact chosen the majestic walls of Castel Beseno as the "canvas" on which to animate the infinite visual combinations of his most famous work. Conceived as "visual music", 77 Million Paintings stems from Brian Eno's constant research into light as an artistic medium and his desire to explore the new aesthetic possibilities offered by technology: by superimposing in random order the layers of 400 paintings made by Eno himself, a software generates 77 million combinations without ever repeating. Synchronised with the visual work in motion, a unique and unrepeatable sound carpet comes to life, such that no sound will be heard a second time. 

77 Million Paintings for Beseno is a spectacular work that, through the projection of a combination of constantly changing paintings, will create a "painting of light" on the East Walls of Castel Beseno (an area of about 1,500 m2 - 100 m x 15 m). Every Friday and Saturday, from 19 August to 10 September 2022, eight evening events will be organised to present the work to the public. Under the starry sky, viewers will have the opportunity to indulge and lose themselves in millions of combinations of paintings and music. 

The unprecedented project "Brian Eno x Trentino", strongly desired by the Autonomous Province of Trento, is organised by the Centro Servizi Culturali Santa Chiara, with the collaboration of the Castello del Buonconsiglio and Trentino Marketing and the production of Alessandro Albertini and Giuseppe Putignani.

(ab) - Source: PAT press office

06/05/2022