Alessandra Piolotto, Sancta Ratio Chaotica! L’ora felice in LA maggiore, 2023

Sancta Ratio Chaotica! L’ora felice in La maggiore is part of the larger body of work Photo Trouvée: la parola all’immagine, which began in 2015, in collaboration with Micamera_Milano, presented at the Pac-Padiglone of contemporary art in Milan in 2016 in a series of meetings dedicated to archive fever.
From 2019 it finds periodic return in the Cinema Beltrade in Milan, in dialogue with the independent film festival Indocili, dedicated to young Italian directors. Each site-specific installation in dialogue with the place that hosts it finds a second restitution in a limited edition, as a form of thematic archive part of the overall project Photo Trouvée_La parola all’immagine.
Sancta Ratio Chaotica! L’ora felice in La maggiore always starts with the finding of an archive photograph, a Photo Trouvée, and the immersion in that image, and then returning it to a narrative interpretation through a path of translation of its underlying aspects into narrative, plastic and sound form.
In this case it is a dialogue made up of continuous evocative cross-references, between the written word of a story, the textile writing of a tapestry and the visual representation of sound on aluminium plates, immersed in the sound setting created in collaboration with sound artist Gea Brown.
The photograph of a relatively insignificant, marginal family moment becomes the subject of an important hermeneutic effort that is not limited to the written narrative. It all starts with a question – what is the little girl, the protagonist of the photograph, listening to? The works start from this same question, but the answer lies more in a path of knowledge, in the impossible attempt to arrive at a verifiable solution.
The answer is actually the experience made in the intermediate space between the real and the possible, in a visualisation of sound, in A major. The works make the sound and atmospheric colour of an auroral moment visible, through the colour and shape that matter takes on at the end of this journey.
The philosophy of the Oriental carpet and the experiments of the physicist and musician Ernst Chladni (1756 – 1827) and the naturalist Hans Jenny (1904 – 1972) on the theory of cymatics were the inspiration for the translation of sounds ‘in A major’. impressed on aluminium and copper metal surfaces using the aquatint technique and woven into a fragment of tapestry. From an image of 22 October 1967, a multifaceted and vertical vision of that real moment emerges.