Pino Musi
Border Soundscapes
con un testo di Marie Rebecchi
Artphilein Editions – 2019
pinomusi.com – pinomusi.com/books
Dopo Facecity, lettura delle facciate di alcune tra le più rappresentative architetture degli anni ’50 e ’60 a Milano, con il nuovo libro Border Soundscapes, edito da Artphilein, Pino Musi torna a proporre una relazione tra architettura e musica (e matematica), presentando una magnifica serie di immagini urbane in bianco e nero che hanno origine dal camminare ai margini della città, seguendo una linea di percorso tangente ai grandi svincoli delle superstrade.
La sequenza dell’opera è, quindi, elaborata come una scrittura musicale. Border Soundscapes ha origine nell’ascolto di una serie di dischi in vinile: String Quartet (II), composizione del 1983 di Morton Feldman (God Records, 2008).
Il risultato finale è un libro che presenta volutamente quasi la stessa dimensione e lo stesso spessore di quel cofanetto di dischi : 32.8×32.8 cm., 1.4 cm. di costa.
In the work of Pino Musi, architecture is a discipline that the photographer has spent a large amount of effort studying, trying to correct perspectives and to give the presence of its modernity a space in which the two mediums collide in a shared pursuit or order born from the chaos of disparate elements-notes perhaps.
Musi’s grids within his images reflect more than a passing nod to modernity, but also regard the city and its architectural elements as uninhabitable spaces in which the presence the humans that have built these structures is purposefully missing.
This haunted rendering of inhuman space intentionally disrupts the faux-utopian ideal. The vistas become cold and excusably inhuman-that is not say inhumane as Musi is a humanist at heart.
His love of culture as seen in Border Soundscapes (Artphilein Editions) is clear. Musi is having a visual conversation about photography, modernity and music.
You cannot be an anti-humanist despite the lack of people found in the photographs and still consider the passion for human culture that sits on the periphery as accidental or unnecessary.
What Musi questions is space, time, rhythm and the grid in which all these elements must manoeuver.
It is a highly successful, perhaps even a dramatic formal pursuit and the results are masterful. The book itself which houses these faux-dystopian vista plays with the idea that photography and music share more than one common set of values-perspectives, rhythms, and compositions and is formally produced in a square LP catalogue of Musi’s images, which ask the we consider hearing his photographs as well as seeing them.
He asks that we read the terrain with our eyes, but that as with most art forms, we let out imagination and passion be the guide of rule for their interpretation.
Its Mid-2019 and I have seen my share of books creeping past my desk and Border Soundscapes is certainly a stand out in the sea of mediocrity. Musi should no longer be kept a secret and his praises should be sung at full volume!
Highest Recommendation..
Links: arengario.it