Cesare Pietroiusti, NEWTON, 2024

NEWTON is a sound work conceived by Cesare Pietroiusti, an artist interested in micro-events, paradoxical situations, behaviour and minor gestures that make up our daily life. NEWTON is an epic of the fall, experienced, suffered and observed by the artist himself. For about two months Pietroiusti recorded with a Lavalier microphone connected to a small portable recorder, which he mostly kept attached to the waistband of his trousers, the sound produced by all the falling objects caused, directly or indirectly, by him. “Things that slip out of the hands, things that fall because they are caught in the movement of other things, things that one trips over or bumps into, things that are badly placed somewhere, things that are unseen. In all cases they are accidental and unplanned falls, due to clumsiness, errors of judgement, distraction, haste. Events that refer to whatever objects: coins, clothes, tools, keys, bottle tops, etc.,” and which the artist defines micro-traumatic because “despite their disarming and ordinary banality, they remind us of our subjection – which is both adaptation and contrast, use and failure – to the force of gravity”. The record contains, on side A, the sounds of the falls, isolated and recomposed in the form of a suite, while, on side B, they are accompanied by a verbal description of the accident that has just occurred, made ‘on the spot’. An ostinato that engages the listener in a well known and unavoidable experience as Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

Listen to the excerpt

A: (11:32)
B: (19:32)