Demetrio Stratos: the voice that defies the impossible on display in Ravenna

From Dec. 14, 2024 to Jan. 31, 2025, Palazzo Malagola in Ravenna becomes the scene of an unprecedented celebration of the figure and work of Demetrio Stratos (Efstratios Dimitriou; Alexandria, Egypt, 1945 - New York, 1979), pioneer of vocal research and visionary artist. To the limits of the impossible. The vocal research of Demetrio Stratos 1970-1979. Second Movement is the title of the exhibition curated by Ermanna Montanari and Enrico Pitozzi, creators and artistic directors of the Malagola International Center for Vocal and Sound Research, with the support of Marco Sciotto and Dario Taraborrelli.

This exhibition represents a milestone in the path of preservation and enhancement of the Demetrio Stratos Archive, acquired in 2022 by the City of Ravenna with co-financing from the Emilia-Romagna Region and housed at Palazzo Malagola, which guarantees its care and public enjoyment.

With free admission, the exhibition is part of a journey that began a year ago with Amorevolmente progredire, amorevolmente regredendo, an initial exhibition dedicated to materials from the archive, and focuses on new themes and perspectives: the exploration of the extra-European dimensions of Stratos’s research, his relationship with world musics and vocal techniques such as diplofonia and harmonic singing.

A journey through sounds, images and objects

The exhibition is divided into seven distinct environments, each dedicated to an aspect of Stratos’ life and work. It is a journey that combines listening, viewing and immersion, offering the public a multisensory experience. An entire room is dedicated to posters chronicling the artist’s career, from his beginnings with I Ribelli to the formation of the group Area and his solo activity. A cinema room offers long-form audiovisual materials, documenting performances, concerts and lectures, while another displays photographs, notes and video fragments visible through a “vintage” monitor.

The sound dimension, the beating heart of Stratos’ work, is explored through three rooms dedicated to listening. These include a room for immersive listening and another that combines headphone listening with exhibited materials. Particularly striking is the ability to choose songs and recordings from a touch menu, which includes songs and music from peoples around the world, as well as music composed by Stratos for Gabriele Salvatores’ Satyricon.

In closing, a niche houses a selection of objects, memorabilia and materials that belonged to the artist, offering an intimate look at his personal and professional life.

Stratos’ vocal legacy

The exhibition has the subtitle Secondo movimento (Second Movement) because it expands the path taken by Ravenna to narrate the archive, documenting above all the openness of Stratos’ vocal research to the non-European dimension, to the musics of the world, and to their relationship with diplo-speaking and harmonic singing.

“Around the limits of language,” the two curators explain, "thus takes shape the second movement of the exhibition of materials. And it is here that two modes that not only Stratos practices but also pedagogically expresses in their full technical-anatomical awareness assume their full value: breath control and repetition, which resonate both in Antonin Artaud and in his self-taught research on diphonic singing. Breath control is ascetic technique, full awareness that the voice does not begin but emerges, is inscribed in a movement that has already always been present and unfolds silently, waiting for a breath to express it, to press it out, to let it emerge in all its enchantment. Artaud knows it well, in his radical urgency to refound the theater from the rediscovery of a word before the word, a poetic tension delivered to us in the work Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu (1947) that Stratos recorded in 1978. So too are the Mongolian singers, and more generally the sound traditions of the Mediterranean area, which Stratos frequents assiduously."

In addition to the focus on non-European musics, another thematic core around which the exhibition is organized is that on “gesture”: vocal gesture, gestures that bring the body and voice into play. “These features of Stratos’s vocal research,” the curators further explain, “can be thought of as vocal gestures that - in the progression of the diptych exhibition - are deposited in time-specific traces, finding form in visual materials, in the notes, sketches, a-systematic scores and recorded sound materials, restoring to us the profile of a prismatic artistic figure intolerant of definitions, as far from the ’official scene’ of rock or pop as from the ’auteur’ scene of those years,” add the two curators of the exhibition and artistic directors of Malagola."

The exhibition also explores the influence of Antonin Artaud on Stratos’ poetics and performances related to Le milleuna, a collaborative work with Nanni Balestrini and choreographer Valeria Magli. Plus materials regarding his participation in the 1978 project/happening John Cage’s Train , his contribution as author of the music Satyricon directed by Gabriele Salvatores in the ’78-79 season of the Teatro dell’Elfo, culminating in a room dedicated to immersive listening to his vocal experiments.

Demetrius Stratos: an artist without boundaries

Stratos, born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1945 to Greek parents, lived among different cultures, profoundly influencing his artistic approach. After moving to Italy in 1962, he began a musical career that led him to revolutionize the very concept of vocals, freeing them from their traditional ties to language.

Founder of Area in 1972, Stratos devoted himself to research that combined Eastern vocal techniques, psychoanalysis and comparative musicology. His solo records, such as Metrodora (1976) and Singing the Voice (1978), represent milestones in this exploration, culminating in collaborations with figures such as John Cage and contributions to groundbreaking events such as The Cage Train.

His untimely death in 1979 left a void in the international art scene, but also a legacy that continues to inspire generations of musicians and performers.

On the occasion of the exhibition, an updated version of the catalog We Don’t Believe in Style will be published . The Vocal Research of Demetrio Stratos 1970-1979, published by Sigaretten Edizioni Grafiche, which combines materials from the first and second movement...

Demetrio Stratos: the voice that defies the impossible on display in Ravenna

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