The challenge faced by director Michelangelo Pistoletto, I've been told, was to make
the Biennial "Evento Bordeaux" 2011 into something that would truly engage an entire
city, not just a restricted artworld audience. The major effort of social "outreach"
was a rare case of going beyond good intentions and lip service, producing very
concrete interaction between art and the local population. Sound/music was a big
part of this successful strategy.
An intense program of exhibitions, concerts, workshops, impromptu gatherings in public places, sound parades, including forays
into outlying suburbs usually overlooked by major cultural happenings. For the whole
sound/music program organized with the help of Sound Res see
here
.
The list of names is too long to include here; in the recording you're hearing the great
Sikh singer Madan Gopal Singh, who also worked together with contemporary musicians
in a number of concerts, then a small snip of the nocturnal sound parade with
hundreds of "boomboxes" by Phil Kline (one of his Unsilent works, electronic
compositions split into many parts on cassette or CD played on boomboxes carried by
people walking around the city in a large group, a series that began in 1992 in NY
for Christmas).
The last sample is from Panic Box by Steve Piccolo, part of the mix
for Radio Grenoble of hundreds of vocal non-verbal recordings made in total solitude
and privacy by residents of the Grand Parc suburb of Bordeaux (
more info)