Andante Con Moto

A speaker suspended from the ceiling plays twenty-five interpretations of “Bella Ciao” on a continuous loop (… Senza fine, 2010). The discontinuous sound of a drop falling unrhythmically from a fleece blanket rolled up on the floor and fastened with two red straps (In No Time, 2024). Some female voices emerge from a series of backpacks and trolleys grouped in a corner (Le Nomadi, 2023). The endless voices and possible echoes of the city of Milan are metaphorically amplified by a mural with the photograph of a giant microphone against the backdrop of Via Breda in the 1980s. The restless noise of footsteps on a floor strewn with broken glass (“ ”, 2001). A voice comes out from twelve loudspeakers arranged in a circle (Moi, 2012), reciting fragments of a description of a performance that took place in 1997. A series of bed frames and foam panels tightened by red straps: on the sides, two speakers broadcast Astor Piazzolla’s tango “Regreso al amor” (Avvinghiatissimi, 1992). Blow-ups of images and posters of a group of people intent on talking into a megaphone or microphone. A whirlwind of loud noises emitted by fishes and recorded underwater fills a completely dark room (In Onda, 2021). And then, three speakers diffusing a female voice reading Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, enriched with personal phrases and the sound of a train (Andante con moto, 2023).

“On the table a tape-recorder with microphone and a number of cardboard boxes containing reels of recorded tapes.”¹

What if I told you that these descriptions were taken from those recordings?
Listen to them now, in no particular order.
Memories of walking into that soundscape came to your mind.
You were alone, as you are now.

You recall these acoustic materials coming from different spaces, and you immediately associate them with Andante con moto, the solo exhibition by Italian artist Liliana Moro at PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan,² which you are now retracing acoustically.

Listen to them, again, in no particular order.
These recordings invite you to enter and remain in the sound, now as then.
There is a physical, emotional and intellectual involvement between you and this sound, between you and the words. These moments of listening and action thus become a shared and collective experience. You are no longer alone.

Liliana Moro, Via Breda 122, Milano, 1989, “Andate Con Moto” at PAC Milano, 2024. Photo: Nico Covre, Vulcano Agency.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Culture and co-produced with Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Andante con moto brings together historical works from the 1980s to the present day. Installed across PAC’s adjoining rooms and the parterre level, the project is curated by Letizia Ragaglia and Diego Sileo. It collects more than thirty years of work in which Moro has tirelessly explored her interest in sound—a central element of her practice since the beginning of her career—her experimentation in spoken and written language and other media such as sculpture, performance, drawing, collage, and video. With a deep curiosity in theatre raised around the mid-1970s and a high-school fascination with the Beckettian philosophy—“it was through Beckett’s words that I began to paint a space for myself”³—her research is often driven by a devotion to the public realm with its political engagement and unexpected stories.

Liliana Moro, Avvinghiatissimi, 1992, "Andate Con Moto" at PAC Milano, 2024. Photo: Nico Covre, Vulcano Agency

Sound has the power to evoke and unfold memories of a place, an event, or a person and to echo their images in our ears. It might remind us of an encounter, a house, a view, a neighborhood, a street. In Moro’s hands, sound becomes matter and social “material.” In her hands, sound is somehow transformed into a sculpture; it’s an element that also defines an architectural structure and a movement. It’s the key that allows viewers to explore the work and re-read the surroundings with unexpected surprise. “Sound almost inevitably has a public dimension. Through sound, sometimes an all-encompassing relationship is created with people, various senses are involved, and I think imaginative processes are also set in motion.”⁴

Beyond the personal and emotional sphere, the urban (and peripheral) landscape of Milan, with its mundane, its light, its rhythm, its collective breath, and its changes over time, is also a recurring focus of Moro’s sound practice, a theme that she has often inhabited in her life and work, switching on and off a pile of tape recorders which are now probably stored in a drawer, but still potentially rich in stories to be revealed. Stripped of ornament, her gesture is, in fact, always open to the relation and interaction with the other; it invites and leaves room for a handful of poetic situations in which everyday objects—if there are any—outline a minimal and scenic arrangement in space. And when there is sound, the artist’s voice is almost always present—“the voice is the body, the instrument and the echo chamber. I use my own voice because I want to take direct responsibility for what it says”⁵—, standing as a marker of memory and as a ritual to be looked at, listened to, recorded, and repeated, as Krapp does.

“He suddenly bends over machine, switches off, wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it foreward to the passage he wants, switches on, listens staring front.”⁶

Giovanna Manzotti (she/her) is a curator, writer and editor based in Milan.