Venice, October 17 (askanews) – An experience that generates art through sound, movement, and image. The installation "Songs of Ascension Shrine" by Meredith Monk, the artist awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, can in some ways be a symbol of the 2025 Music Biennale and, by extension, of all the performing arts Biennales, which are extraordinary moments within the Venetian institution.
On three large screens, viewers can relive a performance by the American artist, recorded in a tower in California. The ascension is vocal and sonic, but also physical; space is meaning, and every movement evokes a clear idea of poetry, in the most vivid sense of the word.
In Meredith Monk, as a brilliant curator like Andrea Lissoni wrote, "every breath, every stammer, every vibration becomes fertile: it resurfaces, it renews itself. The uniqueness of her voice lies in the fact that it doesn't represent, but manifests itself: it doesn't recount an emotion, it lives and generates it; it doesn't describe a space, it opens it; it doesn't imitate life, it triggers it."
Allowing yourself to be accompanied by these "songs of ascension" means precisely allowing yourself to become part of the flow of art, allowing the work to exist for us, allowing it to become the world for 39 minutes and 25 seconds. Made of bodies, sounds, voices, but also of water, of ascent and descent: with a human rootedness that takes on a moving quality. Every fragility seems like strength, every moment becomes decisive, but without rhetoric, only as part of a mechanism that is unique and collective.
Watching Meredith Monk is a way of feeling that art is a force of progression, a retracing, a constant shifting of reference maps. Supported by a voice that expands across disciplines in a temporal and emotional circle well represented by the progression of the tower within which the artist and performers move. (Leonardo Merlini)
Notizie.it editorial team