Australia Council for the Arts has commissioned contemporary artist and noise musician Marco Fusinato to represent Australia in the National Participation at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, from 23 April to 27 November 2022.
Fusinato is a Narrm/Melbourne-based artist whose creative practice involves installation, photographic reproduction, performance, and recording; his overarching aesthetic combines allegorical appropriation with an interest in the intensity of a gesture or event. Fusinato’s musical output is motivated by his explorations of noise as music, using the electric guitar and mass amplification to improvise intricate, wide-ranging, and physically affecting frequencies.
Alexie Glass-Kantor and Marco Fusinato. Photograph: Zan Wimberley
For the Venice Biennale commission, Fusinato has been working with Australian curator Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney. Together the pair present the exhibition desastres, an experimental noise project that brings sound and image together and which will see the continuation of a 200-day performance by Fusinato in the Australian Pavilion at Biennale Arte 2022, Venice. Fusinato paves the way for future artist presentations with this, the first ever, live durational performance at the Australian Pavilion.
“desastres breaks from the traditional exhibition format. This is not a static exhibition, but an evolving work. We will be live for the entire 200 days duration of the Biennale Arte in Venice. 200 days, and every time an audience experiences the work, it will be unique. The intensity of the conditions in which this project evolved has allowed the work to be fully embodied as the complete disaster. The performance of the work isn’t about theatre but the act of labour and perseverance,” says Glass-Kantor.
Marco Fusinato, a page from the ‘Score’ for desastres, 2022, facsimile on Edition Peters manuscript paper, 45.5 × 30.3cm. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
Drawing on his interest in noise/experimental music, underground culture, mass media images and art history, Fusinato developed desastres during extended Melbourne lockdowns, a work that embraces all the frustrations and turmoil of the global pandemic. “I’m interested in the tensions around opposing forces like noise versus silence, order versus disorder, the institution versus the underground, purity versus contamination. These binaries co-exist and in desastres it’s that friction I want to maintain – not eliminate. I feel like these tensions are always rubbing up against each other and the interesting thing is how one deals with these agitations, with the contradictions. It’s that in-between state that I want to occupy,” Fusinato explains.
In addition to his evolving performance, Fusinato has created a Score using images from the desastres archive, which have been printed onto manuscript paper. “The images for the Score are part of a broader archive that Fusinato has been developing for many years,” says Kantor. Audiences can engage with the Score by tapping into the designated desastres Instagram page, where a new image will be posted daily.
desastres is running in conjunction with Australia Council for the Arts’ professional development programs, which includes the Biennale Delegates Program and the Australian Pavilion Invigilation Program.
