On my last Biennale day in Venice, I visited the Italian Pavilion. I had already visited that scaffolding-filled space two days before, but turned away from the door, tired as I was. Yesterday I ran into a Finnish colleague at the Fondazione Prada, in the fantastically crazy Christoph Büchel’s multi-floor work Monte di Pietà, and they said they was going to the Italian pavilion because there were some good names there. Tired, after a long day at the art exhibition, the piece by Massimo Bartolini and his renowned partners – Caterina Barbieri, Gavin Bryars, Kali Malone – would certainly have worked well because there you can just close your eyes and listen, even if standing, but I hadn’t realized this. Well I went again.

The work called Due Qui / To Hear plays a long and soothing organ sound. It’s a great thing, but the texts are confusing once again. Quoting the wonderful sound artist-sound thinker Pauline Oliveros, curator Luca Cerizza writes about how listening is about paying attention to others – be they people, machines or nature. That’s just how it is, but hello! This idea can only sound fresh in the ears of those who spend all their time in the art world where everyone just talks in unison about their own works and where no one listens to anyone and certainly takes no one else into account. (Another colleague said: a typical AI text. Vow!)

Due qui means two here.