The Space, the Sound, the Self and the Other
What is Not Strange by Tashi Wada & Julia Holter
at Chiesa di Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa,
6th of November 2024
The following is a semi-review, semi-meditative journal.
After four years of living in Milan, I had yet to visit the Chiesa Rossa. Upon coming across Fondazione Prada and Threes Production’s announcement, I jumped on the tickets weeks ahead of the performance.
Flavin’s works are ephemeral (metaphorically) and installed in relation to given architectural conditions, something that couldn’t be more evident than in his last work, Untitled, installed at Chiesa Rossa posthumously. The work is registered as a “lighting change” on religious records rather than as a request to incorporate art in the holy space. Flavin indeed makes a curious use of fluorescent industrial lights to soften a space and call for attention to the purity of light itself, stripping away shape, form, and superfluous colour to create an almost abstract, image-object experience. His light installations are propositions - distilled expressions of the essence of perception and of the nature of space itself.
The aqueous blue runs down the nave and the gold illuminates the apse, yet he also made room for the hot pink of the Magdalene in the divine. The experience of seeing and contemplating his work is undeniably mystifying. Although he refuted any spiritual interpretation of his work, he studied for the priesthood and while he finished his career in a church, he also started exploring the subject of icons. Flavin only amplifies the inherent spirituality of the place of worship, drawing out its transformative potential.
At the expense of sitting up front, we decide to sit as centrally as possible. The choice proved to be premonitory for my search for balance, later fighting the urge to leave my seat and sit down in the perfect midpoint of the nave as the 5° of misalignment with the crucifix and the slit progressively felt more and more unbearable.
Dan Flavin, Untitled, 1996.
The performance is played entirely on two keyboards and at times on the bagpipe. From the first few notes, there is a clear echo to the organ that you’d usually expect to hear fill up the space under the coffered ceiling. Aside from sharing a similar player interface, both instruments can sustain notes indefinitely – a 4-count breathing exercise. The sound qualities of the latter can be mimicked by the former: depth, richness, reverb, echo, and vibration.
Whatever in this comparison cannot be achieved through the keyboards is completed by the bagpipe: an expansive sound, a powerful projection into the space. Both are innately solemn and ritualistic. Both rely on air to produce sound. The bagpipe is living while the keyboards are (on paper) aseptic, much like the fluorescent lights. Julia’s voice is another instrument relying on air. Sometimes murmurs and whispers, sometimes wails and whimpers. Sometimes ecstatic, sometimes angelic. It fills up the space with notes melting into others.
From my seat, I can’t see Tashi until a collective turn of heads announces his circling of the crowd, idle in his pacing as he picks up the bagpipe. I am hypnotized by the organ’s shadows on the golden back wall of the apse, a pattern similar to the ring on my finger which I’ve suddenly gained a heightened awareness of.
The simplicity of the sound structure and somewhat repeating musical motifs create a constancy that is calming, drawing the crowd to mental stillness. Sustained tones and drone-like effects provoke a resonance that envelops both the audience and performers in a bubble that is out of time and out of standard space. The dissonances occasionally bring tension and release, a push and a pull, a strain and a resolution. Resonance, vibrations, and pulses mirror the body’s own organic rhythms.
I doze off soon after Tashi regains his place. Images come straight to my mind, it’s a space-aware dream, my eardrums still awake to the music being played. They are images of confusion, of quiet chaos and agitation among the crowd. Long scrolls of paper have been pinned to the walls on the side of the nave, and fleeting figures begin spray-painting them.
Dan Flavin, Untitled, 1996.
The piece ends and in the thickening silence, the crowd catches a breath gasping me out of my torpor. I gaze upwards, desiring to be absorbed by the warm blue neon and comforted for my shameful power nap. My eyes then fall on a screen attempting to capture the singular pairing of the installation and the performance. The desire to document the moment simmers in my hand too, but I’m afraid that by reaching out for my phone I’ll regain consciousness of time. How long will the concert last? I’m not bored yet.
Images come back to me, not out of slumber this time. They’re ones of dancing, of immersion in movement. Altered states of consciousness unfold, transcendence feels within reach. Individuals all dissolve into an ideal rapprochement, tender and accepting.
Then comes a third kind. It takes us on a train to a hidden stream where the dance continues, where the crowd shifts to a body of water and the cassa dritta to babbling. Touch, a caress, an embrace. Sun and droplets flickering on bare skin.
Arvö Part, Tabula Rasa, performed in 2019 at Chiesa di Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa.
Foucault coined the term heterotopias based on 6 principles in a 1967 lecture, literally meaning “other spaces” and acting as real, findable utopias. They’re sacred spaces in a way, with a multiplicity of functions, which offer altered contemplative experiences and suspended rules of engagement. The space for spiritual exploration is created through disruption. I argue that “What is not strange?” at Chiesa Rossa is a triple-layered heterotopic space. It juxtaposes different meanings, uses, and spaces that are in themselves incompatible.
The first layer is the church, the sacred and meditative space used for worship, reunion, celebration, expression of grief, contemplation, education, rootedness with history, visual and auditory appreciation of art. It sits on various slices of time, accumulating them the same way museums or libraries do.
Flavin’s installation makes up the second layer, enhancing the synchronic sense of time as his colours bring together different phases of the day. It creates a physical and sensory dislocation, transforming the space and the way we perceive it.
The last layer of the heterotopia lives in the bodies of the performers. Through their physicality, Tashi and Julia fluidify boundaries. The sound itself acts as a conduit, the ordinary is suspended, and new, layered experiences unfold.
Heterotopias are reserves of imagination.
James Turrell, Chapel at Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof, 2015.
Searching for meaning in my mental vagrancy, I now realise they were all images of:
Movement, dynamism, and evolution.
Resistance, defiance, and disruption (note the history of the church and its surrounding area).
Healing through community and/or nature.