Mark Vernon. Saturnine Orbit - Special project Art City 2024

The project Saturnine Orbit is made of a sound installation and a live, commissioned to Mark Vernon in the Giorgio Morandi House Museum and in the spaces of Fienili del Campiaro, privileged places of the bolognese painter during his vacation period in the Bolognese Appennines in Grizzana Morandi. 

The artists creates a instant collage of sounds with their own narrative. The tape serves as a chronological sounds diary and it will be verbally annotated with the location, time of the day and weather conditions, coordinates that could also have been important to Giorgio Morandi as a painter. 

Next to field recordings collected on the site during the productive residency, Vernon will employ Morandi objects as sound instruments, using the internal space of bottles, jugs and vases in Casa Morandi as small resonance chambers, while environmental recordings of the surrounding countryside will be played inside these objects with tiny speakers and microphones. Through this process, the outside becomes the inside: the world inside a bottle. In addition to digital recordings, Vernon will use a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a technology that dates back to the time when Morandi lived. Excerpts from the only existing recording of the Bolognese artist's voice will also be included. All the material thus collected and reassembled will be presented in a sound installation with a more abstract compositional tone, and in a live performance that will contain visual and performative elements, focusing on the manipolation of objects and on the interactions between microphones, speakers, tape recorders and tape loops. 

During ART CITY Bologna, a daily series of sound excerpts from the creation-in-progress will be broadcast on NEU Radio; the live sound performance in the Fienili will also be broadcast live.

To facilitate the arrival in Grizzana Morandi by the public from Bologna, a free shuttle bus will be provided departing from MAMbo to Casa Morandi in Grizzana Morandi on the mornings of Saturday, Feb. 3 and Sunday, Feb. 4, returning to MAMbo in the evening. On both days, a connecting service will be offered to Vergato station to coincide with the arrival and departure times of trains to/from Bologna.

Bus ride Bologna- Grizzana Morandi h 10 a.m.: departure from MAMbo, via Don Minzoni 14, Bologna.
Reservation at 051 6496611 starting Monday, Jan. 29, limited seats subject to availability.

Return by bus Grizzana Morandi to MAMbo at 6 pm with arrival around 7 pm.