New Echo System Igor Cardellini+Tomas Gonzalez – Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Venice

The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia offers a programme at the Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi to stimulate on-site experimentation and creation. The programme is intended to be multidisciplinary and is constantly evolving.

The first stage of the programme, NEW ECHO SYSTEM, comprises a series of performances and concerts that will gather Swiss and Italian artists from all disciplines around a common language: contemporary music, whether it be jazz, electronic or experimental. These encounters focus on collaboration between the disciplines, from the research phase, spent together at the Palazzo, to performance, either on-site or in collaboration with local institutions.

How to approach our future when we dwell in a place promised to disappearance? During their residency in Venice, Swiss artists Igor Cardellini and Tomas Gonzalez have created “2100”, a site-specific work envisioning a fantasy version of Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi at the dawn of the 22nd century. Developed in collaboration with sound artist Agnese Menguzzato, countertenor Alix Pétris, and choreographer Wojciech Grudziński, the piece combines sound design, vocal performance and dance with an installative work. Igor Cardellini and Tomas Gonzalez began this research process by asking artificial intelligence about the future of the palazzo and Venice in 100 years, based on projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They received an overwhelmingly detailed, though unsurprising, answer. According to the AI's prophecy based on available data, this place where we are gathered tonight will be partially submerged and eaten by the sea within the next century.
This result led them to question the strategies we develop to cope with the idea of near-death and destruction in daily life. Denial might be one, greed another. Both leading us to a state where past, present, and future conflate, trapping us in desperate carelessness and accelerating our dark fate.
To translate this state, they reinterpreted Baroque musical and choreographic codes to mix them with various contemporary influences. Together with Agnese Menguzato and Alix Pétris they recomposed a new version of the aria “Ombra mai fu” from Georg Friedrich Haendel.
In this dystopian and oneiric universe, the palazzo becomes a living entity awakening from the weirdest dream and sharing it with the people sheltered inside its walls. Also part of the vision, a strange Pierrot wanders its halls like a lost soul bewitched by an ever-flowing monstrous fountain.

Concept, text: CARDELLINI | GONZALEZ
In collaboration with: Wojciech Grundziński, Agnese Menguzzato, Alix Pétris
Sound design: Agnese Menguzzato
Lighting design: Edouard Hügli
Installation/sculptures: Igor Cardellini
Costumes: Atelier Planeta
Makeup: Emmanuelle Fuentes
Administration, production: Sarah Gumy
Coproduction: New Echo System – Pro Helvetia, Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi
Support: City of Lausanne