Rewire Festival - Proximity Music: States of Fragility

Proximity Music is a joint exhibition programme initiated in 2021 by iii and Rewire Festival, which seeks to connect music, architecture, technology, ritual, and play through spatial experiences engaging with all the senses. From the 5th till the 7th of April, nine newly commissioned and adapted artworks by emerging and established artists will inhabit various locations across the centre of The Hague.

With contributions by: Marco Fusinato, Nandita Kumar, Sophia Bulgakova, Henk Schut, Jeanine Verloop, Myra-Ida Van der Veen, Andrius Arutiunian, Louis Braddock Clarke, Pelle Schilling 

This year's edition Proximity Music: States of Fragility presents a series of works set against the backdrop of unsustainable and often fragile social, political and ecological systems: from a disturbed ecological balance to ongoing wars and geopolitical tensions. Through the lens of personal, creative, and sometimes unorthodox approaches, artists develop instruments to explore different forms of human and more-than-human knowledge. They invite us to establish new relationships with our immediate surroundings, other geographies, and complex ecologies.

The monumental work DESASTRES by Marco Fusinato will be shown at Pulchri Studio. It fuses live-noise performance with a never-ending feed of images sourced from open-source picture libraries, making us aware of the sonic and visual overstimulation that is omnipresent in our highly mediated society. 

DESASTRES (2022–ongoing) is a durational performance of experimental, noise, and metal guitar through mass amplification that synchronises with images. First performed at the 59th Venice Biennale for 200 consecutive days, artist Marco Fusinato improvises slabs of noise, saturated feedback, and discordant intensities with an electric guitar that triggers a deluge of disparate and disconnected images onto a large-scale, purpose-built screen. The images are sourced via a stream of words that have been put into an open search across multiple online platforms as well as from Fusinato’s own photographs taken with his phone camera. The mass indexing is a mess – a morass of randomly generated images. There is no theme as such; rather, the immersive encounter with sound and image is open interpretation, creating some kind of hallucination, offering elation through disorientation and exhaustion through confusion.

Marco Fusinato is a contemporary artist and noise musician whose work takes the form of installation, photographic reproduction, performance, and recording. He conceives his work as a succession of interrelated projects, often continuing across numerous iterations. Within these projects, the works are almost always serial and use specific frameworks for experimentation. Working across disciplines and cultural fields, Fusinato explores the tensions and contradictions of opposing forces such as underground culture versus institutions, noise versus silence, minimalism versus maximalism, and purity versus contamination. As a musician, Fusinato explores the idea of noise as music, using the electric guitar and mass amplification to improvise intricate, wide-ranging, and physically affecting frequencies. He performs regularly in the experimental music underground, primarily as a solo artist, and has released many recordings.

Proximity Music: States of Fragility is on view from 5-7 April, daily from 12:00 till 20:00, free of admission. Participating locations include Pulchri Studio, Paleiskerk, WEST Den Haag, Theater aan het Spui, Barthkapel, Kloostertuin, Quartair and Billytown.