For the first time, great contemporary art at Lerici Music Festival

From July 26 to August 11, 2024, the Lerici Music Festival will host the exhibition Memotopography, a solo show by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa (Havana, 1967). This is the first time thatcontemporary art will dialogue with the international music festival that animates the Golfo dei Poeti.

Curated by Carlo Orsini in collaboration with Galleria Continua, the exhibition is intertwined with the theme of the eighth edition of the Lerici Music Festival: memory. Through twelve visual and sound works, Garaicoa explores the concept of architectural space as a theater of events that shape the life rhythm of its inhabitants. His multidisciplinary approach embraces culture and politics through architecture and urbanism, highlighting the links between the living dimension and the idea of memory.

The exhibition takes place in the spaces of Villa Marigola, the festival’s historic venue. The 18th-century building, embellished with views of Lerici, becomes for Garaicoa a symbolic projection of the social arrangements it represents. The exhibition unfolds along three rooms and invites visitors to reflect on the dialogue between art and urban space.

Carlos Garaicoa uses paper to construct fragments of the city in S/T Bend Building (2021), accompanied by documentary images of urban ruins that emphasize the precariousness of the urban fabric. In The Roots of the World (2016), a table crossed with knives symbolizes the tension between construction and destruction. With Photo-topography (2012), the artist transfers urban photographs onto polystyrene, establishing a parallel between urban ruin and the contemporary art system, highlighting the exploitative dynamics that often characterize both. The exhibition concludes with a video projection of the work Partitura, where the concept of the city is evoked through an orchestra composed of 40 individual recordings of street musicians, each with their own cultural background. “Partitura” celebrates the potential for unity that can be created by great diversity.

The exhibition opening is scheduled for Friday, July 26, 2024 with an evening event open to the public. The program includes, at 6:30 p.m., a screening of Abismo, Carlos Garaicoa’s video work that starts from Adolf Hitler’s obsession with classical music to set up a reflection on the resilient power of free and creative thinking. The video’s soundtrack, which takes up the third movement of Olivier Messiaen’s 1941 Quatuor Pour La Fin du Temps, entitled Abyss- “Abismo” in Spanish-is performed live for the occasion by clarinetist Mahé Marty. The evening continues at 9:15 p.m. with a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quatuor Pour La Fin du Temps” in its entirety by the quartet composed of Alexander Bedenko (clarinet), Alberto Bologni (violin), Alexey Zhilin (cello) and Massimo Spada (piano).

Memotopography fits into the rich and varied program of the Lerici Music Festival as a valuable moment of dialogue and correlation between different creative forms. The artistic vocation of the territory of Lerici paves the way for a new project path that connects the visual and musical arts, generating opportunities to cultivate new collaborations with artists, galleries, curators, collectors and sector operators.

For the first time, great contemporary art at Lerici Music Festival

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