!e Indians of Brazil say that at "rst the duckWas afraid of the river, and had a canoe made of clay.But when the canoe dissolved and he foundHimself in the river, he discovered he loved it.!

If both you and I, at least at some point in our lives, have found ourselves feeling like the duck, then surely we have other things in common. Reality, as it presents itself, is constantly asking us to come up with cheap tricks or expensive interfaces to understand it and bring it under control. Rivers, for people like me who are born in cities built around one, are a particularly incontrovertible example of absolute volition, so much so that a river’s one-way direction has always been compared to the "ow of time. Fishermen, canoeists and swimmers (and now even you, me, and the duck) know very well that under the surface inhabited by "oating tree trunks and industrial scum, the streams of water form thousands of random eddies and directionless whirlpools. Knowing that they exist obviously changes neither the river’s direction, nor the location of its head, its mouth, and the sea, but might help save our skins when swimming, or sharpen our skills when building that canoe made of clay. I too have built a canoe for myself, primarily out of synthetic felt and sound, trying to experiment with various possibilities in many di#erent contexts. I’m not completely satis$ed with all the other interfaces that pretended to be interactive, yet in the end, only regulated my perception of time (and I’m not just talking about tra%c lights).& Or perhaps I simply want to rid myself of the inertia inherited from the world of objects, and from the vivid mobility of their recent virtualization. I called my new interface Ripetititititive Space, but have gone on to give it another suitable title to each speci$c incarnation of it, as well as adding texts, posters, storyboard images, collective seating, sculptural installations, and so on. I haven’t built the canoe just for myself; I’ve tested it out before letting you try, but I’ve never been alone in the process. I trust the canoe will prove useful to other people too, as “an invitation to pass

The e t e rna l l y l i v ing f l ameRicca rdo Be rna s s i

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love, by melting into the river and "owing away with millions of currents. In a similar way, the synthetic felt initially appears in the form of a path to be walked on, and then all at once, does a vertical wheelie.' At $rst, our feet perceive the shift from "oor to felt, and we also sense an alteration of the voice, the reverberation of air in our body. (e brain receives information from our senses of touch and hearing that alters what they are accustomed to, aligning them in a muted attunement that we identify as comforting) and thus inviting. (en at a later point, the felt stops serving as a footbridge, rising towards the ceiling and becoming an anti-form which carves out a space for itself while declaring its ephemeral nature: soft, mutable, pliable. (e speaker from which the sound emerges is hidden in the rolled-up, hanging felt, although its position can be guessed upon closer inspection. Paradoxically, we are able to locate the source of the sound only by moving over the very material (the felt) that attracts our visual interest (by impeding it). Even though the volume of the audio is quite low, in the sound that moves through the felt to reach our ears, we immediately recognize the same stubborn insistence of a streetlamp in the night, which challenges the fog to meet our gaze. (e transformation of the pathway into an anti-form may disorient us, and we may even go back to feeling like bipeds deprived of interfaces. While it is true that the applause of the crowd has already replaced subjective silence at some funeral ceremonies, it is also true that this applause has shifted the focus to the living individuals, to the people clapping, whereas the silence of the past re"ected the transition underway, the deceased person’s gradual passage into memory. Today, sound is accepted as act of life, a necessary enzyme for celebrating social moments. It $lls the organized void that spreads out under our gazes and, at the same time, multiplies it, as if to show us that every void, in the end, is just an absence of time. It is because of sound that the Ripetititititive Space runs to meet us instead of waiting for us to arrive, reconnecting us to a place where nothing seems to have happened save the fact that we are here. Sound modi$es our concept of visual art as air conditioning modi$es our concept of architecture, and is invisible as much as they are underestimated. And “[…] If Background music is as intrinsic to manmade environments as air-condi-tioning, can anyone be held responsible for assimilating it, humming it at home, hearing it in dreams or (for the more inventive) transcribing it at a piano?”* (e sound in Ripetititititive Space is played in endless loops that take advantage of how the tape gently erodes itself every time around. (ese temporal variations constantly modify the room’s reverberating harmonics. It is precisely and paradoxically this gradual loss of information that generates life. Isn’t architecture, after all, a method

through the eternally living "ame […] as is generally known, only those who are themselves "ames can pass through the "ame unburnt.”+ My personal experience has helped me envision the Ripetititititive Space, but now only yours will be able to keep it alive. (e $sherman’s opinion about the river might be very useful for the swimmer, and vice-versa, and the idea that these two people might come in contact with each other on my canoe encouraged me to construct new ones, honing the project. More people will be here and more will be easy to discuss about the river, to de$ne its essence. Could we stop to blame quantitative excess as lack of intensity? One might say that any quantitative excess is partial, and every political metho-dology that tries to organize this excess is based on a conscious desire: to forget those who are not present. For this reason, it is fundamental to re-establish the phenomeno-logical nature of human co-existence within a certain space at a certain time, in order to de$ne a common desire, and paradoxically, it will be $ne by everyone because there will always be someone absent., To call a Ripetititititive Space a sound installation means overlooking its inherent capacity to be a meeting ground. From many standpoints our river of reference is man-made. Architecture seems to translate natural space into a plausible, human scale of values. It may be hard to date a rock without speci$c expertise, but if the rock becomes a column, a tile, or a step, it will be easier to $t it directly into our personal timeline. As if the date of a building’s con-struction o#ered evidence to our senses about the fact that the date itself actually existed. (e same thing goes for dimensions: there is no better way of measuring some-thing than moving through it. Ripetititititive Space therefore refers to architecture in order to re-establish the degrees of separation between vessel and content, and it does this by constantly referring to the human beings who move through it in search of knowledge. Every Ripetititititive Space is an attempt to highlight the friction generated when an act of life (like us) enters a somnolent sentence (architecture as a simple aggregation of past). Ripetititititive Space is therefore a temporary environment formed by visually eliminating certain portions of the space that houses it, partially erasing the vessel we have come to know as hypocritical architecture, which pretends to be eternal. In"uenced by the desire to grasp an unstable spatial con$guration while adopting a permanent strategy, each Ripetititititive Space is born out of a speci$c space, repeating a basic set-up during the installation process. (e basic set-up can be divided into two stages, just like the duck’s clay canoe. On the one hand, we see the clay take a semi-geometric, functional form, the canoe, to comfort the frightened duck. On the other, the clay brings about the discovery of

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Riccardo Benassi, "ohrwurm", 2010, synthetic felt, sound loop on hidden endless tape 33'', installation view at the Embassy of the Italian Republic - Berlin, commisioned by Alessandra Pace and Marina Sorbello, courtesy the artist, photo by Nick Hess.

Riccardo Benassi, "collective prearrangement, variable countdown", 2010, synthetic felt, loop 11'' on hidden endless tape, poplar, spray paint, instalation view at Castello Malaspina di Fosdinovo, commissioned by Alberto Salvadori, courtesy the artist and Castello Malaspina di Fosdinovo, photo by Dario Lasagni.

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Riccardo Benassi, "1982", 2010, synthetic felt, two sound loops on hidden endless tapes 33'' and 363'', waiting room chairs, adhesive transparent "lm, 12 digital images in iron black frames, installation view at Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma - Macro, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, courtesy the artist and Fondazione Pasti"cio Cerere, photo by Giorgio Ciardo.

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Riccardo Benassi, "!e First Kiss (Bending a Building)", 2010, synthetic felt, loop 12,21' on hidden cd player device, installation view at Radio Arte Mobile - R.A.M. Roma, curated by Jimmie Durham, courtesy the artist, photo by Giorgio Ciardo.

of managing time according to repetitions (the seasons) as opposed to our daily exper-ience of accumulated time (aging)? A stair step, a roundabout, a balcony, an elevator, and a car park are all examples that show how time can be split in this way. (e sound in Ripetititititive Space accentuates the split in order to free us from the pressures and constrictions of time. In doing this, I experiment with the conceptual superimposition of two electronic music genres that may seem distant from each other, but which are very well-suited to de$ning “[…] the perennial bourgeois-bohemian impulse to delineate a $rm border between the discerning few and the undiscriminating mass […]”; to pose an ancient dilemma again, a “[…] neo-Cartesian split between head and body as the struggle between atmospheric mindfood versus thoughtless rhythmic compulsion […]”.- My goal is to stretch the point of overlap between ambient and techno music to its furthest extreme. Only could say that this lies in their shared challenge to death: on the one hand, by forcing our heartbeat into a half-asleep state, and on the other, through an over-excitation that does not recognize the concept of an end. While it is true that the creation of an environmental work can free the artist from the position of an invertebrate inhabiting someone else’s shell, it is equally true that the creation of sound for a speci$c space must pass through a certain technology. Still, there is no one right technology for any given space. We should not refer to the space itself; rather, we should envision a hypothetical group of listeners. If sound belongs to everyone, how can it be designed to $t into a system of di#usion? I would rather $t it into a context or a format, to create a relationship with the people who will listen to it, or will use it as a background for conversation, or even dance to it. If what we are interested in today is how rather than what, it may be because we are asking the medium to mirror our subjectivity. We still trust our senses and we know they are not easy to multiply through technology. (is does not mean that we won’t use technology, quite the contrary; we will abuse it to gauge how it is complementary to invisible, imaginative errors, as a bridge to a better life. For these reasons, the speakers in the Ripetititititive Space are not visible: if the message is coming from the medium to reach the listeners’ brain, it should pass through their ears! We should never underrate kryptophonia, because it is a genuine method of cultivating subjective psycho-phonia. In a recent speech titled “How Architecture Helped Music Evolve,”. David Byrne claims, through a historical digression, that every musician undergoes a Darwinian adaptation to architecture, and this seems like a plausible model of creativity. But the real question is: how has music helped architecture evolve? At one point, unconsciously,

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of a temporary meeting ground, a dense fade in the void, that will soon melt into the river and "ow away with millions of currents.

/ Jimmie Durham, Columbus Day - Poems, Drawings and Stories about American Indian Life and Death in the Nineteen-Seventies, West End Press, /012, p. 345 “[…] It is a well-known fact that the ‘Close the door’ button in most elevators is a totally dysfunctional placebo, which is placed there just to give the individuals the impression that they are somehow participating, contributing to the speed of the elevator journey—when we push this button, the door closes in exactly the same time as when we just pressed the "oor button without ‘speeding up’ the process by pressing also the ‘Close the door’ button. (is extreme and clear case of fake participation is an appropriate metaphor of the participation of individuals in our “postmodern” political process.” Slavoj 6i7ek, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-matrix-or-two-sides-of-perversion2 Boris Groys, !e Communist Postscript, Verso London/NYC, 5880, p. 429 “[…] Le nombre n’a rien à voir avec la vérité. Il ne prouve rien. Il n’a jamais valeur de preuve. Le fait majoritaire peut, par convention, clore une controverse. Mais l’appel reste toujours ouvert. De la minorité du jour contre la majorité du jour, du lendemain contre le présent, de la légitimité contre la légalité, de la morale contre le droit.” Daniel Bensaïd, http://www.npa5880. org/content/«-démocratie-dans-quel-état-»-le-scandale-permanent-par-daniel-bensaïd3 To $nally put an end to that $ctional threshold, the so-called skirting board.: (e idea of Comfort does not have a positive or negative meaning. (e bell of a country churches rang wildly and endlessly only on two occasions: for the beginning of a plague, or its end. Similarly, in the Ripetititititive Space, this meaning is determined by the visitors’ subjective points of view and based on each individual’s self-placement along the time line.4 Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music – A Surreal History of Muzak®, Easy-Listening, and other Moodsong®, University of Michigan Press, 5889, p. 5/41 Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash – A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, pp. /34 – /30, Picador, London, /0010 www.ted.com, TED – Ideas worth spreading/8 Kengo Kuma, Anti-Object – !e Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture, pp. 12-19, AA Publications, London, 5881// Kengo Kuma, ibid. p. /2

Byrne begins to answer this: “But, Wagner made an Innovation. He wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast. So he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there.” And it was, in Kengo Kuma’s opinion, exactly this architectonical bass-booster that pushed the separation between stage and audience to an extreme: “[…] the stage became an entirely separated world, its otherworldliness and privileged character only reinforced by the music emanating from a hidden source.” Nor did Wagner stop with the construction of two proscenium arches, he also “[…] devised a new arrangement for the seating as well […] the stage was made to dominate […] isolated individuals confronted the privileged object, one on one […] individuals, left, as it were, in low-ceiling darkness and then suddenly confronted by a transcendent and radiant being […] not so very di#erent from the solitary viewer in front of a television set[…].”!; Or, why not, the solitary viewer in front of a laptop on a desk, exactly where I’m writing from. While it is true that sound is the necessary and invisible counterpart that architecture needs to show it is alive, it is also true that the creative moment behind a desk is the essential counterweight to the social balance of every celebration. So the two-dimensional shift of stereo sound, or of the screen, is central to the creation of content, but should not become the main aim at all. Getting back to David Byrne, there is a fundamental gap in his description; it is the introduction of the microphone as a singer’s new point of reference, and the iPod as contemporary pop music’s ultimate vessel: “So at this point, music diverged. (ere’s live music, and there’s recorded music.” Even during live music, the organization of the sound system steps in for architecture as the $nal reference point of our presumed adaptation. I came to understand this by attending techno parties, where nothing was less important than the temporary occupied architecture’s original function, and the central role was played by the power of the party-generating system. For those reasons, our near future will be happily overrun by techno-euphoria, and our challenge will be to reformulate the rites rather than to construct new temples. However, even architecture is a#ected by the appeal of two-dimensionality as a popular medium: “Communicating the impact of a building to large numbers of people eventually became a primary objective of modern architecture. […] Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe led architecture in this new direction. (ey created extremely photogenic works of architecture that were su%ciently new and individualistic to be recognized as such a single, decisive black-and-white photograph.”!! What can one say about the images of Ripetititititive Space reproduced in these pages? Luck is on their side, because we are already taking these images as the delimitation border