AIR TIME #2
Wind Pressure Concert

a project by Silvia Hell
Piano performance by Marco Lenzi
happening of Iacopo Seri

Saturday, October 16th 18:00 hrs
Silos Granario, Port of Livorno. In network with Little Bit Festival of Livorno and En plein air Gastprojekt des Kunstraum München

Wind Pressure Concert is a concert for piano and particulate matter conceived by the artist Silvia Hell, performed and interpreted by Marco Lenzi in the Silos Granario in the Port of Livorno, recently reopened to the public.

In a sort of space-time short-circuit, a composition whose subject is air will be experienced.

In 2008 the European Parliament produced a reference text to monitor air quality. Silvia Hell decided to approach this document as if it were a musical text, instead of reading it, she started to sing it repeatedly on blues bases. Interested in the rhythm of information and the possibility that a regulation imprints itself in an emotional substrate, the artist focuses on the importance of the public dissemination of data that imposes that document, and from which the score takes shape.

After Bolzano (2019) and Munich (2021), Wind Pressure Concert arrives in Livorno with a score that concerns the concentrations of particulate matter, PM2.5, recorded in the air from 2008 to 2020; the data, which can be consulted publicly, concerns the daily average values of dust and comes from the historical archives of Arpat.

The regulations to fight pollution foresee thresholds and limits not to be exceeded on a daily and annual basis, but the way in which these are communicated varies according to the different geographical areas examined.

The score uses this “discrepancy” as potential for the musician Marco Lenzi and will consist of a chronology of PM2.5 concentrations recorded at the closest station to the port of Livorno -via Carducci- from 2008 to 2020, with two different air quality interval systems: one determined by Arpat Toscana and the other by Arpa Lombardia. Lenzi freely encodes the score and performs it on the piano.

”The atmosphere of Livorno had anticipated this event from a distance, accompanying me to Milan and elsewhere. I immersed myself in the work of Juan Pablo Macías skyscapes_on cloud-life that daily updated On Air and on this occasion a collaboration was created, projecting the archive of Livorno skies during the concert in the Silos Granario.”

— Silvia Hell

photos: Iacopo Seri