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Some time ago, at a market stall, I found these two postcards: a soldier on leave (for this reason very content and satisfied…) letting someone take a souvenir shot of him to send to his family and friends. In the first image, the photographer, to make the subject sweeter, has prepared a beautiful bouquet of artificial red flowers. In the second image, the flowers are still there, but they are withered and strewn across the bench, lifeless. Magically whitened. The result is surreal and if it were not clearly staged, a mise-en-scène, it could suggest fantastic interpretations and hidden, subliminal, messages. This double image symbolically shows the meaning of the art of copying. On this recording, as I have already done in the past, I appropriated music that belonged to other instruments to create apocryphal versions of it (sometimes with license) and then delivered them to the final and resolute judgment of the author. Hotel Boltanski is a place for the soul, a small museum of wonders, my Wunderkammer. Here experimentation and pop, freedom and rigor, order and disorder, memory and future, numbers and clouds, all co-exist. Its rooms are inhabited by composer friends, people I’ve never met, travelling companions, tutelary deities. It is a sincere and passionate tribute to a great artist who has accompanied my work for years with books, postcards, catalogues, photographs, exhibitions, and discussions: Christian Boltanski. I take this opportunity to create a list, one that perhaps my beloved Georges Perec would have liked, where all experiments that, with no apparent form, have come and gone over the years according to a free and without a preestablished order, are lined up like toy soldiers. Now, however, this list puts them in relation to each other and the thing takes on different and mysterious meanings. I realize I have filled entire notebooks with names of composers and pieces of music, relative durations, composition and birth dates.
Lists, numbers, names, numbers, lists and then more numbers, numbers, numbers…
Manuel Zurria
Rome, September 6th, 2016
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