By Alessandro Santoro

Indeed in some way I am an intruder. Intruder authorized by the three authors who sign the interart -text of which we publish here 10 pages. We can say I am a moderate intruder since I oversaw the entire publishing project . Well, then, what I can offer readers in this little preface is a kind of multi-dimensional floor plan of the work. A set of signs that signal paths among the bushes and the work which, however, nothing guarantees that will not dissolve themselves after the first turning . Think of them as short notes of one of the early explorers .

Let’s start from the title and subtitle: S / Concerto for Europe. Canvases for theaters with no performance in the form of a poem. It is an open work and a work in progress, therefore , drafted in the frame / frameless concert / disconcert in four movements .
The contributions of the three authors , on the other hand , apparently only define the fields you can go through following the unraveling of the work. Actually, the “textual wanderings ” by Santoro, the ” visual textures ” by Martin Petric and the ” sonic adventures ” by Francesco Libetta let us imagine crooked paths, abnormal trespassings , unpredictable avoidances, raids among the
texts of other authors.

And this is already enough to ask an active role on the part of the ‘ reader ‘ , forced to invent his own strategies to use the ‘ canvases ‘ , in order to decompose and recompose the’ visual textures ‘ lost and found in the ‘ sonic adventures ‘ . May we say , then, that we find
ourselves in front of an ‘ art mechanism made up to capture the complexity of reality ? Maybe. If we knew precisely what is real . If , instead , what we call real is something we have to conquer, continually extending and withdrawing the networks of our thoughts, trying to decipher the strange monsters that we see stirring in the meshes of languages, then the complexity cannot be a formula, but a process inside which we and the others make subject and object, sounds and silences dance. It is clear that a privileged trajectory is to contain, isolate and besiege the power of the ego. And try to dissolve it.

In this confusion(dis/concert) three canvases-scenarios condense and discard themselves. One, the most dense, tells of a bombed female psychiatric hospital. Soma mad women violated by wolves in uniform. Serb , Bosnian or NATO Soldiers ? When the night falls all rapists are gray. And, together, there are “the remnants of charity” that descend from the sky. And with the aids imposed by humanitarian wars also boxes full of costumes and masks of a theater company invited to the festival of ancient theater at Epidaurus come.
Another canvas – scenario tells of a family separation and children who are trying to find a meaning to their life path.
The third scenario tries to take shape within the tangle of mythological tales wowen , unthread and rewoven around Europe, it is the torn backdrop the entire DiS / concert.

The styles that cross the text are also plurals: prose and poetry, dramatic text and captions, dialogue and commentary , quotation and translation;
 the metamorphosis of the black snake of writing devastate the white of the page, forcing it to be colored , to redden with clotted blood in the” black roll of letters” that melts its way running towards the edges.
 And also plural are the languages that stretch , they bloom and wither around the trunk and large branches of Italian. There is also some breath of languages dried on the walls of caves, gasps of existences nailed to the crosses of the past. But even translations – betrayals snatch words and verses from great or unknown poets: Shakespeare , Pagano, Aeschylus …
The musical notes may be misleading : do they show paths in the dark mystery of the sounds ? And if they were simply notes to steal someone else ‘s canvas and turn it into a musical ? On the graphics there would be much to say . Martin Petric reminds us of a ‘ nowhere ‘ in a world where colors and shapes come from, rather than illustrate the text , they seem to produce it. It is a sort of shapeless lump from which words bloom and preserve the bitter irreducible remain of things.
To conclude : the relationship between graphics and text and between text and music seem to postpone the discourse on synthetic Bauhaus art and in particular on Kandinsky ‘s theories about the relationship between sound and color –Do you remember the notations for Violett ? – But the search for antecedents would take us off track … we could find so many . Too many .

Or none.