Mariateresa Sartori

The sound of Language

25 May - 14 September 2008

curated by Chiara Bertola

With this project, Venetian artist Mariateresa Sartori confronts herself with the Querini Stampalia's renowned Library.

Maintaing the use of Library resources, inside the room where dictionaries are held, on an open shelf, the artist puts some books with headphones, inviting visitors/readers to listen to the original language of poems. They are significant, yet their semantics is unrecognizable because of the alteration of the order of hte consonants, even though intonation and metrics are untouched. As a consequence of it, poems are totally incomprehensible, yet incredibly familiar.

Mariateresa Sartori tries to rescue the melody and the musicality hidden in all languages as far as possible. In order to do that, she eliminates the “distraction” caused by the meaning of the poems and lets the rhythm and melody, suffocated by their denotative function, come forth. The sounds of language, set free from semantics and revealed as sounds, are preserved from space and time.

The exhibition was organized in cooperation with the Veneto Region and the support of Galleria Michela Rizzo in Venice.

Images of the exhibition

Catalogue: Mariateresa Sartori. The sound of Language.

Edizioni Gli Ori, Prato, 2008.