Totem rises like a presence.
Three black and monolithic towers stand out in their height and magnificence inside a room. Their shadow stretches out to the earth and reaches your feet, tracing a path between you and them. They look like three giant men who supervise without moving, standing in their place. Guardians of something mysterious, magical, ritual.
From the blows, the percussions, the rustling and the voices that raise from the inside one can perceive a human presence, which is enclosed in these towers but has become a lively part of them. By speaking to you and by interacting with each other, together they create their calling. The sound is transmitted to your ears through the four walls of the tower.
It is a distant, profound sound, that passes through the materials and makes them resonate: it comes directly from their center, from the bowels, from the earth.
The idea for this performance-installation comes from the discovery of an invisible audio technology. There are some special materials that are defined Intelligent because they can transform energy from one form to another, like the Terfenol-d for example, which is a restrictive magneto material: when exposed to a magnetic field, it changes in shape, dilating and contracting so that you can transform wide surfaces in real sounds speakers by exposing them to high frequencies.
There are some devices that can put in vibration several types of materials.
Every sound passes through wood, glass or even water and it is expanded in the atmosphere without the need of traditional P.I.
Our will is to take advantage of this powerful distinctive feature in order to create an installation-performance in which three performers are closed into three black towers, constructed ad hoc with several types of resonant materials, and on stage they will sound like they're amplified, without the use of any speaker.
The three black towers are the three speakers and the sound is generated directly inside them. Every tower will have its own particularity with the aim to obtain interesting sounding results.
A tower will be made of metallic materials and will be implied in the creation of rhythmical sequences; another one, constructed in wood, will be used to produce organic sounds made with the performer's body and voice, while the third one will be in plastic materials and it will create a homogeneous background of rustlings and vibrations.
The technology that makes itself invisible and that is revealed in apparent simplicity is the better way for us to use it. It gains force in its absence.
The choice to build these three towers and to hide the human presence, that instead acts manually, comes from this same concept of invisibility and hidden functionality. But the towers are outside human measure, they are constructed in an overshadowing shape, as if they were modern totems, that remember and make you feel the weight of their hidden operations.
The performance is presented also as an installation, in the sense that the public does not set himself in frontal way to the show, but will be let free to take place in the position that he prefers.