La dolce attesa | Paolo Sorrentino | 2025 | 意大利

显示全部楼层 · 发表于前天 01:50

Supported by the scenographer Margherita Palli and the soundscape of Max Casacci, the Oscar-winning director pays tribute to a universal feeling: waiting. Not an interval but life’s most serious time. Marked by the beating of a heart, hidden, mysterious. La dolce attesa (Pavilions 22-24), the installation-project by the director Paolo Sorrentino for the 2025 Salone, is an experience that transforms the space into a high-angled shot of suspended emotions, into a limbo of visual and sound suggestions, playing on the borderline between two verbs. One of which is to wait, which doesn't mean standing still. Waiting means shifting one's gaze, tending towards. Pursuing, without running. Then there is the other, the hasty, peremptory one: waiting. Which makes us anxious. A foot tapping nervously, an eye on the clock, time that fails to pass. Waiting is the state of mind of impatience. Waiting, on the other hand, is a dimension. A place where things can happen.

A time of transition. This is (perhaps) why the director describes it as “sweet.” Because waiting is not passive. It is slow, but fertile. An incubator. It needs time. Time to transform chaos – the chaos outside and inside us when we wait in a clinic – into something recognisable. Not instantly. When the time is right. You have to know how to be in the emptiness of that room. Which means that how that space is designed and created can make all the difference.

As Paolo Sorrentino explains: “In “La dolce attesa” we talk about waiting for a medical response. The kind of waiting that becomes suspended time. We remain suspended. Still, tense, nervous. And anguished. And the waiting room, as it has been conceived until now, only serves to amplify that anguish. Between white walls, uncomfortable chairs, monitors flashing up numbers, grumpy employees, you end up obsessively focusing on your smartphone. Perhaps, then, we should rethink waiting. Trick it. Travelling and getting lost in the journey as if in a vague sense of hypnosis. So, perhaps, waiting can become less painful. Because it becomes something else. Our waiting room aspires to be something else. It doesn't force you to sit still, but lets you go. A little trip, like when we were children, on reassuring rides. As adults, the rocking horses have become shell-like armchairs, like mothers' wombs. Disaffected office workers are replaced by men and women who reconcile you to an idea of tranquillity. They smile at you and know how to give you a fatherly pat. Your eye is drawn to a jumble of frosted glass that hides and distorts the only element that, assuming it continues to beat, can prolong our life. This is the heart. Hidden, mysterious, semi-invisible, but there nonetheless, reminding us that all is not yet over.”

In the era of speed and “we want it and we want it now, ” rediscovering the sense of waiting means dealing with it by seizing the opportunity to observe and listen to oneself. Waiting is like the moment before dawn. To fill this darkness, Paolo Sorrentino has chosen Margherita Palli – a set designer with a forty-year career behind her, studded with collaborations with directors such as Luca Ronconi, Liliana Cavani, Mario Martone, Alexander Sokurov and choreographers such as Yang Jiang, Daniel Ezralow, not to mention numerous awards, including six UBU Awards. Having had no idea what to expect from her first meeting with the director, she said: “I'm a set designer, I work on opera, prose, exhibitions and events; with my collaborator Marco Cristini I awaited the arrival of Sorrentino; what did he want from me, what was I supposed to do, an anxious wait to find out what the theme would be. With just a few words but with a precise idea in mind, he told us about ‘his’ wait and asked us to think of a place that would make it gentler and of a kaleidoscope hiding a heart. When he left, I thought I should carry on as I usually do, creating the scenography for an opera; moving through an ephemeral structure with a sense of direction and attention to signs, symbols and meanings, respecting demands. A theatre is a large space, generally to be found in the middle of a city. Large theatres are called opera houses, while smaller theatres can be called ‘La dolce attesa’ (Sweet Expectation) and be found inside a pavilion at the Rho exhibition centre.”

If waiting is a suspended space, sound must be able to fill it while marking its rhythm. To this end, Paolo Sorrentino has entrusted Max Casacci with creating a sound fabric that would mark its flow. An underlying, pulsating beat accompanying the immersive experience of the installation without being overpowering, but penetrating the very breath of those experiencing it. A musician, producer and sound engineer, Casacci is known for being the founder and guitarist of Subsonica, one of the most influential bands on the Italian music scene. His sound research has led him beyond the boundaries of traditional music, experimenting with environmental sounds and transforming everyday life into compositions. He recently collaborated with Michelangelo Pistoletto, with whom he created Watermemories, a sound work harnessing the sounds of water in Biella. He was the director of the Traffic Torino Free Festival, one of Italy’s most important rock festivals, and has been the recipient of numerous awards during his career, including the Italian Music Award and the MTV Europe Music Award for best Italian artist. The sound he has created for La dolce attesa is a presence that vibrates, expands and contracts, just like time spent waiting. Casacci has put together an acoustic landscape that envelops the visitor, evoking the tension and magic of waiting: “Music without musical instruments that, using just the sounds and songs of the sea, the sounds of the forest, the breath of the wind and the transparency of crystal, immerses itself in the rhythm of waiting,” says the musician. Waiting is not silent, it is an inner rhythm that pulses below the surface. And in this hypnotic and dizzying journey, Casacci’s sound becomes the hidden beat of the passage of time, teaching us to listen to waiting with fresh ears and a fresh heart.