04:13

A twine of voices expands in the air, caressing the romantic architecture and the sacred images. A polyphonic quartet takes the scene up, but the singers’ head is a monitor, which broadcasts their recorded image. Each of them holds a monitor because their performance exists only if mediated by the television media. Nowadays, the monitor represents the only interface through which what remains of culture can be broadcast. The world of the cathod ray tube has overcome the world of books, of theatre, of cultural places and of all those means that convey knowledge. The television has become a step-mother that cannibalizes everything. The universities and the schools surrendered to the television barkers and to those who spread false myths. The culture is sold together with advertisement like in talk shows. The advertisement, which determines and rules everything, burst into the singing, breaks the performance, alters the tale and mixes up with the performance dimming the faces and deforming the harmonies. The Choir becomes thus the emblem of decadence where a whole heritage surrenders to the necessities of a system that has completely re-defined the fruition of culture. The integration of advertising extracts in the harmonic composition suggests that commercialization is a force that destroys culture, which then becomes a flattening mixture where all identities get lost. The Choir tries to underline a contrast that is rarely noticed, as it is hidden into the hues of language.  On the one side, there is the painful awareness of a declining world and on the other the manipulative superficiality of the market show, which dulls the audience with the calculated futility of gingles. This work, combining depth and superficiality, displays the current obscenity: the king is naked, and as the beautiful clothes disappear, there only remains the grotesque reality of fiction.