Extremes (Cage, Reich, La Monte Young)

Workshop for the Topolovska Minimalna Orkestra
conducted by Antonio Della Marina

Since 2008 the TMO has been one of the most frequent event at Stazione di Topolò, it is an open orchestra that accepts adults and teenagers, amateurs and experts but the director is aways the same, the musician form Udine Antonio Della Marina. The TMO has performed In C by Terry Riley several times and also Gustav Holst, Eyvind Kang, Luc Ferreri and Della Marina; this year it will be played the most extreme program ever realized by an ensemble: Clapping Music, by Steve Reich; 4’33’’, by John Cage and Composition 1960 #7, by La Monte Young; although the piece is composed only by 2 notes, it is really difficult to play and it represents, in a minimalistic way, the other side of 4’33’. In Topolò we can…

Antonio Della Marina is a composer and sound artist, who for several years has focused on working with sinusoids. Clearly influenced by the minimalist avant-garde of the American east coast in the sixties and seventies and in particular by the work of La Monte Young, his work exploits the physical properties of sounds and the use of microtonal tuning systems. Della Marina uses mathematical abstractions and custom built sound generators to shape his compositions which are offered in the form of sonorous sound sculptures. Since 1998 he has been active in sound art through concerts, lectures and sound installations. Since 2008 he is the conductor of the Topolovska Minimalna Orkestra.

Enrico Coniglio and Nicola Di Croce

Listen the abandonment

"But his unconditioned silence petrified me"

In the book "La lucina" Antonio Moresco describes his voluntary and solitary exile in an abandoned village. In this experience the listening is the favorite instrument to read the context and to decipher the routine and the seasonal transformations. But the listening is also an instrument that makes us not to believe to that unlimited silence that rejects every form of living.
The silence amplifies the auditive perception, it reveals the most subtile details, it teaches, but at the same time it makes "ears ring" for the extreme rarefaction of the fragments that it lets us hear.

Itinerary of the installation
The installation is divided into two moments:
-a room is dedicated to the amplification of the auditive perception (due to the silence);
-a room is dedicated, in a negative way, to the dissuasive nature of silence. 

Room 1
"The sky is withe too. I can’t hear no more the sounds of the animals, of the earth, of the air. Absolute silence." Installation for 4 speakers and ultrasound dissuasive devices.

Room 2
"When there is the moon it can be seen clearly, daily illuminated whit its ghostly light, the border of the small street which is overwhelmed by vegetation, the cliffs from which comes up the sound of water that digs its bed into the resonant clefts of the rainy mountains and into the gorge, the big shapes of trees that stand up against the sky."


Installation for loudspeakers, found objects and contact microphone

Environmental sound recorder and sound artist, Enrico Coniglio is a musician interested in the beauty of the landscape.  His research is focused on the relation between music and the contemporary representation of the landscape (www.enricoconiglio.com)
Nicola di Croce is a musician and architect interested in the relation between sound and territory. He is a guitarist and a sound artist, he has also published a few acoustic and electronic album and has handled numerous installations and multimedia productions (http://nicoladicroce.tumblr.com)
Both of them are members of AIPS- Italian Archive Auditory Landscape.

Armando Battiston

Accordion Brainstorming Improvisation
(Storms and reflections for Stazione di Topolò)

In Accordion Brainstorming Improvisation, the artist submits himself to the freebases accordion, conveniently amplified and to the electronic melody. Thus he creates a personal itinerary based on absolute improvisation, precisely on a storm of musical ideas.  The improvisation proposals are therefore guided by the artist’s long and consolidated creative experience, which goes from free-jazz to contemporary and cultured music, and it creates a formal, substantial and all-absorbing synthesis.

Battiston is a well known jazz pianist and compositor, but he’s also an original multi-instrumentalist, who favors flutes and the accordion. He did a lot of recordings, he took part in many festivals all over Europe. He handles conferences and seminaries where he  compares Jazz with classical music. He worked together with writes, film directors, scientists and composed music for movies and theatrical performances. He deals with workshops on improvisation and musical composition

Armando Battiston

Armando's Stretchable Sound Reflections
(Storms and reflections for Stazione di Topolò)

In Armando’s Stretchable Sound Reflection, the artist uses two synthesizer, an alto flute, a recorder, live electronics and voice. The variety of the instruments allows Armando Battiston to elaborate a "series" of sonorous reflections, in which the instruments talk to each other, in an extemporaneous composition. During there "series" the artist uses twelve different incipits, which generate a dodecaphonic-sonorous series.  Therefore a huge crative cell is made, but it doesn’t bind the development of the event: Armando's Stretchable Sound Reflections.

Battiston is a well known jazz pianist and compositor, but he’s also an original multi-instrumentalist, who favors flutes and the accordion. He did a lot of recordings, he took part in many festivals all over Europe. He handles conferences and seminaries where he  compares Jazz with classical music. He worked together with writes, film directors, scientists and composed music for movies and theatrical performances. He deals with workshops on improvisation and musical composition

Ammon Ngakuru, Charlotte Drayton - Auckland (New Zealand)

Driving from the nearest city, the roads are gradually smaller, stonier, less well kept

Ammon Ngakuru and Charlotte Drayton are artists from Auckland, New Zealand. The artists made a short research trip to Topolo in September 2015, and have used this encounter to develop moving image and text works for Stazione Di Topolo in 2016.The text recounts this trip up to Topolo— creating a framework, or guide, for a moving image work. The moving image work was then created using New Zealand equivalences to attempt to conjure an image of Topolo, translated through memory, time and locale. These two works take memory as a method for translation, echoing both the physical and linguistic distance between Topolo and Auckland.

Ammon Ngakuru (b.1993)  Auckland, New Zealand. works primarily in installation with a focus on video and sculpture. Ammon's practice responds to questions of misidentification, uncertainty, distance, absence and fragmentation, paying particular attention to the way that these issues manifest within shared cultural environments.

Charlotte Drayton (b.1989) is an artist living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. Her work focuses on how memory and association might become embedded in sites, this manifests in installation and text based works with a focus on architecture, infrastructure and the built environment. Charlotte has a MFA (Hons) from AUT, completed in 2014 and was the recipient of the 2014 Iris Fisher Award.

Anja Medved - Kozana

Sewn memories
topolò / livek

In 2012, during the Stazione Topolo, the digitalization of family photos of people from Topolo and neighboring village Livek, which is located on the other side of the border, was organised. On this occasion anybody who brought the photo was also invited to tell his memory on this particular frozen moment in front of the camera. Once the village Topolovo and Livek were closely connected, so the project aims to rebind memories, that were torn off by the border.

Anja Medved (1969, Nova Gorica) studied theater directing at the Film and Theatre Academy of Ljubljana. In her documentary projects she explores relations between personal and collective memory. Livek is the village of her grandparents.

meeting clandestine cinema

It is true that every border place is a capital of clandestinity and Topolò makes no exception. Stazione does not evade this postulate but rather turns it into a poetic flag, especially in its film, documentary and screenings program. During Stazione the authors themselves often present unreleased and unseen works, condemned by the laws of market and profit; they unveil backstages and refined project that unintelligible circumstances have sentenced to oblivion. All of this "border" material becomes clandestine cinema in our "border movie theater"; and clandestine cinema can easily have an extraordinary schedule, risk-loving directors and a very, very peculiar audience

Les Tambours de Topolò

Return to Piazza Grande

The group was founded during Stazione, in 2000, on the occasion of our first street drumming workshop for youngsters. Originally composed by 5 people, LTdT is now a much larger ensemble, well known far beyond the borders of Friuli and has been part of prestigious festivals and events in many European countries.
LTdT's instrument of choice is a 250 liters oil barrel. Since 16 years LTdT represents a stable and longed-for contribution for Stazione.
www.ltdt.it

ToBe Continued, 7th edition

Sound marathon across the globe for the World TB Day
recorded on march 24th 2017

ToBe Continued is an original concert during which musicians from many parts of the World connect to a website to broadcast their music in a un-interrupted 24 hour marathon (ToBe Continued... from 00.00 hours to the midnight of March 24th CET). Each musician plays a 30-minute set, thus creating a relay of sounds and rhythms that ranges from the different streams of the "new music".
The event, that covers the 24th of March, World TB Day, is coordinated by Antonio Della Marina, musician and computer music composer, and by Moreno Miorelli, artistic director of the annual gathering "Stazione di Topolò/Postaja Topolove". The whole initiative is under the aegis of the Global Health Incubator, the 'laboratory' established in July 2009 in Topolò to create links between the world of creativity and that of science.
The participating musicians performed live from many different countries including Cameroun, Chile, Costarica, Perù, New Zealand, China, India, Iran, Mexico, Argentina, Philippine, USA, Indonesia, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Morocco, Georgia, Turkey, Russia and many European countries creating a symbolical tour of the world with 48 stops.

Phonophani - Bergen

Friendly transits
curated by Norway's Embassy in Topolò

Phonophani (Espen Sommer Eide) is a musician and artist currently living in Bergen, Norway. He composes under the alias Phonophani, and as a member of the band Alog. He uses elaborate setups of custom-made instruments, hybrids combining electronic and acoustic elements. He has several releases on the record label Rune Grammofon.
In addition to touring extensively with his musical projects, Phonophani also has produced a series of site-specific pieces and artworks. These projects include composing and performing music for the 50-year anniversary of Le Corbusiers chapel in Ronchamp, France, building the sound art installation Sonus Barentsicus for the Northern Lights Festival in Tromsø, Norway 2007, and a special performance at the Manifesta7 biennale in Italy, where local vinyl records were reconstructed into new musical instruments.

meeting clandestine cinema