Urban Sound #6 // Gripia City, Luca Resta
16m 49s, sound
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The URBAN SOUND series gathers works realized through the recording and editing of sound collections. The sixth version Gripia City (2021) comes from the collection of street musicians’ recordings started in Paris in 2012. Each single recording captures a melody and also returns the surrounding soundscape – the frenetic footsteps of passengers, horns, rails, voices – giving life to a portrait of specific temporality and spatiality. Like in a walk in the city, the work evolves over the time of a journey among the different metro lines and the street melodies played by musicians from East to West of the world. Gripia City retraces 2020, also translating class struggles, the daily frenzy and the health dramas, shedding light on those invisible and atonic sounds that continue to fill spaces of transient sociability. Between pauses and movements, even the strikes against the labor reform and the manifestations of the French feminist group and of the European act of Black Lives Matter participate in drawing the portrait of a recent Paris and its social and political complexity, that still lives in the public space and appears already distant from today. Animated by the ephemeral, the work lives in the condition of invisibility and, paradoxically, highlights the a-sonority of the underground musical performances.


Luca Resta
(b. 1982, Italy) lives and works in Paris. Luca Resta is a visual artist; his research questions the concept of "repetition" conceived as a phenomenon that characterizes our society. The ontological value of repetition is investigated in all his works in relation to contemporary dynamics. The act of collecting characterizes his production and becomes a fully-rounded aspect of his artistic practice. His collections are made up of everyday objects that are often "disposable", a trace of the consumerism that still defines our present, and also of sounds that he collects in urban contexts and archives as unheard acoustic details that he lets emerge from the chaotic ensemble of our cities.

Among the national and international group and solo exhibitions: Inaugural Exhibit, Art Raw Gallery, New York (2009), Quali Cose Siamo, Triennale Design Museum, Milan (2010), State Of The Arts, 54° Venice Biennale (2011), Chambre Quatrevinghtcinq, Ars + L, Bergamo (2013), Calcio D’inizio, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2014), Do Disturb #2, Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2016), Talent Prize, Macro, Rome (2017), It Happens, Galleria Il Ponte, Florence (2018), Depiction Of Nature And Society, Galerie Italienne, Paris (2019).

21 February - 20 March 2021

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