Castello del Buonconsiglio and Castel Beseno light up with new site-specific installations by Brian Eno

Inaugurated in Trento the site-specific multimedia installations created by British artist Brian Eno in the spaces of Buonconsiglio Castle and Castel Beseno as part of the Brian Eno x Trentino project. This is an unprecedented project, strongly desired by the Autonomous Province of Trento, organized by the Santa Chiara Cultural Services Center, with the collaboration of Buonconsiglio Castle and Trentino Marketing and the production of Alessandro Albertini and Giuseppe Putignani.

Picking up the suggestions of the spaces of the Buonconsiglio Castle, in the spaces of the Magno Palazzo Gardens, Cortile dei Leoni and Sala dei Vescovi, the visual artist and composer has created Three Installations for Buonconsiglio (visible until November 6, 2022), a site-specific installation that consists of a series of works conceived on the basis of the spaces that host them, to create within them a dynamic flow of sounds and visions. Installed at key points in the castle and integrated into them, Eno’s works dialogue with the surrounding environments and accompany visitors on a journey that, superimposed on the museum exhibition, offers them a unique synaesthetic listening experience.

It starts on the ground floor of the castle, from the Gardens of the Magno Palazzo, with the audio sculpture for the Gardens of the Magno Palazzo, an evolution of the “classic” Speaker Flowers, originally intended for indoor spaces. Always moving from the same concept, which is to create tranquil environments in otherwise crowded places, the work evolved in progress and thus reached the outdoor spaces. “The work consists of three pieces that I composed for the occasion and imprisoned in three terracotta pots,” Brian Eno explains. The three unreleased pieces, through an ever-changing cycle of notes and sounds, project the visitor into anatmosphere of idealized stillness.

On the second floor, four loudspeakers positioned inside the Cortile dei Leoni broadcast into the space of the hanging garden Music for Cortile dei Leoni, an audio installation with original music, where for the first time the voice of his youngest daughter appears, composed by the artist especially for the Castello del Buonconsiglio. Finally on the third floor, in the Sala dei Vescovi, finds home Face To Face, the latest work in the exploration of random patterns and combination possibilities conducted by Eno to produce unexpected and unusual works of art. The work stems from a small group of photographs of real faces: eighteen real people, each captured in a single photograph. And it reflects on the concept of “coming and going” related to the cycles of life. Using specially developed software, the image slowly moves from one real face to another in a pixel-by-pixel process of change, generating a long chain of “new human beings,” in which people who never really existed cross paths with other human beings, at the rate of thirty every second. Thirty-six thousand new faces were born in this version.

Instead,Castel Beseno is home to another striking large-scale audiovisual installation, 77 Million Paintings for Beseno (on view through September 10, 2022), a specific and expansive adaptation of Eno’s most popular artwork, 77 Million Paintings. Indeed, the artist has chosen the majestic East Walls of Castel Beseno as the “canvas” on which to animate the endless visual combinations of his most famous work. Conceived as “visual music,” 77 Million Paintings is an ever-evolving landscape of sounds and images, born of the artist’s ongoing research into light as an artistic medium and the aesthetic possibilities offered by generative software. This large-scale, ever-evolving musical and light installation slowly evolves.

77 Million Paintings reflects Eno’s generative approach to artistic creation: “One of the things that strongly attracts me to generative art is the idea that it is such a big thing, with so many variations, that even the artist cannot (pre)see all the possibilities [....] Since my first experiments with light and sound in the late 1960s, I have never ceased to be fascinated by the surprisingly intricate, complex, and unpredictable results produced by simple deterministic systems. From simplicity comes complexity. This is for me the most incredible idea of evolutionary theory and cybernetics. John Cage once said, ’The function of art is to imitate nature in the way it operates,’ and this has been a goal for me throughout my working life.” Through the projection of a combination of changing paintings, the installation creates a “painting of light” on the East Walls of Castel Beseno.

"Here differently from what usually happens, I have worked a lot on places and spaces, from a small studio inside the Castello del Buonconsiglio reasoning about what I am interested in investigating, namely the relationship between music and space, and how music can ’create a place.’ Here for the first time I experimented with a new method: the long song, or the encounter between ambient music and the voice," said Brian Eno.

For info: www.brianenoxtrentino.com

Admission to the Castello del Buonconsiglio in the Castle ticket office. Admission to the eight evenings (every Friday and Saturday at 9 p.m. until Sept. 10) at Castel Beseno is charged (10 euros) and tickets can be purchased at www.centrosantachiara.it.

Image: Brian Eno, 77 Million Paintings for Beseno. Photo by Pierluigi Orler

Castello del Buonconsiglio and Castel Beseno light up with new site-specific installations by Brian Eno

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