Paola Pivi is not a sound artist. She is known for large, destabilising sculptural gestures — the feathered bears, the overturned truck, the leopard in a room of cappuccino cups — and for installations that work on a viewer’s perception rather than on their reading.
Which is what makes her account of one listening experience, given to designboom on 27 October as part of their weekly series on the music behind creative practice, useful to anyone who builds work that plays sound in a room.
The same recording, twice
Pivi describes a recent performance of Franco Battiato’s “Summer on a Solitary Beach” heard through a 24-channel speaker system at Triennale Milano. It brought back the memory of a car ride decades earlier.
Afterwards she played the same track online. She found it “annoying and disturbing.”
The recording did not change. What changed was the number of speakers, the room, the fact of being among other people listening, and the absence of a choice about when to stop. Pivi’s conclusion is that a song “can sound entirely different depending on how and where she hears it” — not better or worse, but a different object.
Why that matters past the anecdote
Anyone installing audio in a gallery is making decisions that are usually treated as production details: how many channels, where the speakers go, whether the sound is diffuse or localised, whether a visitor can escape it.
Pivi’s two listenings are an argument that those decisions are not downstream of the work. A 24-channel system does not deliver the track more accurately; it makes a different experience, one capable of retrieving a decades-old memory that stereo on a laptop actively repels.
The practical form of this, for a working artist: a piece auditioned on headphones at a desk has not been auditioned. The thing a visitor will encounter — in that room, at that scale, with that reverberation, surrounded by strangers — is a different artefact, and the only way to know what it does is to build it there.
On structure, and on the limits of the comparison
Pivi describes conventional song structures as restrictive and prefers the unpredictability of experimental music. That is consistent with her sculptural work, which withholds the resolution a viewer expects.
She also, per designboom, believes music and visual art operate on different terms — and declines the easy equivalence between them. That is a useful corrective in a field fond of calling visuals “compositions” and sound “sculptural.” The claim is not that one is superior but that the transfer of vocabulary flatters both and explains neither.
Discussing Leoni, 68,000 Watts of Light — an installation using twelve large lights to alter viewers’ perception — she questions the assumptions behind it rather than describing the effect. Her medium there is the viewer’s visual system, approached the way a 24-channel array approaches the auditory one: by overwhelming it until it reports something it would not otherwise report.
Read it for the refusals
Interviews with artists about music usually produce a playlist. This one produces a set of refusals: the structures she finds restrictive, the songs she can barely listen to anymore, the track that worked in one room and failed in another, the analogy between art forms she will not make.
For a reader building perceptual work, the refusals carry more information than a list of favourites would.
Sources
- designboom listens: paola pivi remembers what music leaves behind — designboom
- Triennale Milano
- Paola Pivi — the artist’s own site