Gianluca Favaron, Stefano Gentile, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Rod Modell "Landslide" 2xLP

 Edition of 300 ** 13 Presents Landslide by Gianluca Favaron, Stefano Gentile, Carl Michael Von Hausswolff and Rod Modell. On October 9, 1963, 260 million cubic meters of rock broke off from the top of Monte Toc. It fell into the reservoir of the Vajont dam, producing an enormous wave of at least 50 million cubic meters of water. The dam, completed in 1959 and one of the biggest in the world at the time, did not suffer any serious damage. However, flooding destroyed several villages in the valley and killed almost 2,000 people. In some ways, it is as if the landslide swept away the past and the future of an entire community. An apocalypse lasting just a few minutes left scars and stigmata for decades to follow. Time is crystallised in an eternal present. Around the Vajont area, you often hear small landslides. Landslide: a natural downwards movement, more or less rapid, of large masses of earth and rock; also the hole created by this movement, and the accumulation of material from this release. Movement and accumulation are two keywords that guided the search for the sounds hidden in the silence of the Vajont landscape. In quiet moments today, the landscape reveals reverberations of it’s past... the movements of downward sliding, crystallized substances, and ghosts of its previous inhabitants. Frozen in time. 

Exploring the area, one wonders if anything remains under the surface. The original version of Landslide, and the Carl Michael Von Hausswolf version, re-construct nature in a unique and unusual way. Sewn with the smallest amount of sonic fabric. Resulting not in a verbatim recreation of an event, or emotional responses of that event, but rather.... a more intangible interpretation. Impulses that trigger feelings of the fall, the movement of land, and detachment. Expressed with a new code of sound. Mixed together, overlapped, collided, reaccumulated, and merged together again. While the Modell versions offer a more organic approach. Sounds of the valley at night, layered with psychotropic drones and other hovering noises. Echoes of present combined with echoes of the past. Calamita/à(2013-ongoing) is a tool for investigating the contemporary Vajont and the topic of catastrophes in general. The project is curated by Gianpaolo Arena and Marina Caneve. “0” is a collaboration between Calamita/à and Silentes where visual arts join sound.